In the late summer, I accordingly sailed in a small steamer from Hamburg to Leith and was received with great friendliness by Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie at Kilgraston. Among their guests were James G. Blaine, his wife, and two of their daughters. My acquaintance with this remarkable family soon ripened very fortunately for me into close friendship and resulted finally in my marriage to Margaret, one of the daughters—but I am progressing too fast. Mr. Blaine had been defeated for the presidency in 1884. Since that time he had been occupied in completing his book “Twenty Years of Congress,” and in the spring of 1887 he and his family were taking a year’s holiday abroad. Because of my youth and the exigencies of my profession, most of my life had been spent among musicians and those interested in music. This was the first time that I came into personal relations with a great statesman, at that time the foremost in our country, and I found to my amazement that, although an atmosphere of great dignity surrounded him, he was absolutely simple and gentle in his contact with other people. His wife, a woman of singular strength of character, with a highly original mind and an absolute devotion to her husband and his ambitions, was in many ways as remarkable as he. Her knowledge of and interest in literature—poetry, history, memoirs—was very comprehensive, and the discussions thereon, which were constant at Mr. Carnegie’s table, interested me immensely and opened new worlds to me. The two daughters, Margaret and Harriet, high-spirited and sharing the interests of their parents, gave them a devotion and love so partisan and intense in its character that it seemed at first to attract me toward them almost more than anything else. As a boy I had suffered agonies at seeing my father misunderstood and often attacked by men not worthy to tie his shoe-strings, and here I found similar conditions but on a much greater scale, as Mr. Blaine’s career had been national and his triumphs and defeats had enlisted the sympathies or execrations of millions of American citizens. Music had entered but little into the lives of the Blaine family—although since then my wife has become enthusiastically devoted to it—and I was really delighted that for the first time in my life I was compelled to establish relations from a purely human standpoint and without the assistance of any of the “romantic glamour” of my profession. At this time, however, I got but a glimpse of the Blaines, as they stayed only a week after my arrival, but there were delightful rumors of a four-weeks coaching trip from London to Scotland which Mr. Carnegie was planning for the following summer and for which we were all to be invited.