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REMINISCENCES OF THE LATE MINISTER'S DEPARTURE FROM NEW YORK ELEVEN MONTHS AGO-DETAINED ALL NIGHT OFF SANDY HOOK BAR BY A FOG.

The following narrative is furnished by a gentleman who accompanied Mr. Taylor down the Bay eleven months ago, when he sailed, full of life and hope, to represent his country at the Court of the German Empire:-

Bayard Taylor sailed from New York exactly eleven months ago, gratified by a such a demonstration of popular favor as probably no other man ever received under similar circumstances. He is now on his way back, and another demonstration in his honor awaits him, amid which his heart will not beat, nor his face brighten, nor his voice be heard.

This sad return has surrounded every incident of his departure with a pathetic interest, and doubtless many reminiscences will now be revived which otherwise would have passed by and been forgotten. I have not seen any record of the last and more quiet goodby which a few of us had the opportunity of wishing him at the latest moment far down in the lower bay.

THE MEETING ON SHIPBOARD.

The afternoon was stormy enough to try the fidelity of any friend who might desire to bid him farewell on shipboard, especially as it involved crossing the river to the Jersey shore. The skies were pouring bucketfuls upon the steamer's deck when I arrived, but I found him below, in the midst of a group of relatives and near friends, his face beaming with pleasure and gratification as he sat chatting gayly with all. His reception of me was as cordial as I had reason to think it might be. We had not met for some years, but enough of old times came up in connection with the passing moment to make it natural for me to say after awhile:-"You are the best loved, the most praised and the least abused man I know. Aside from any honors you have earned, there is a magnetic charm about you which not only holds your friends, but draws many toward you whom you have never seen. What is your secret?"

"I don't know," said he, "unless it be that my heart goes out very warmly to people, and I speak out as I feel."

This was it. It lay in the almost boyish simplicity of his response to you, in his unreserved heartiness and a freshness of feeling which neither success nor failure could sophisticate or sour. He was not selfish or self-conscious enough to study or to fear the fullest expression of himself, and, even in the midst of all that was at this very moment stirring about him and distracting his attention in every direction, I could see this winning quality in an alert and natural courtesy which forgot nobody and neglected nobody. No one could have taken his manner for a politician's tact. It was all genuine. His heart was as rich as his head, and how few men are born to both these fortunes!

MR. TAYLOR AND MR FIELD.

As may be supposed, the conversation among us was constantly interrupted by the trooping in of those who had come to bid him farewell. It was a good opportunity to see in rapid succession some of the literary notabilities of the day. Whitelaw Reid, W.D. Howells, E.C. Stedman and many others passed in and out, and as his voice greeted them and rung out their familiar names, sometimes grasping them by the hand and shoulder with burly warmth, one could see how sterling and true was the relation which he held to them as the honored centre of the group. I remember especially his unusually affectionate greeting to Cyrus Field. Holding his hand, he threw his arm half around his neck and said, "My true and tried friend, you never fail. You are one to lean on without fear." I have not the words, but this was the substance of the cable message which returned from the heart of one chivalrous nature in magnetic response to the other.

Soon the storm above stairs swashed itself out enough to give us a lull on deck, just as the Holsatia cast loose from the pier.

"Oh!" said Mr. Taylor, looking at the newsboys on the wharf, "I intended to have bought the illustrated papers, and now it is too late." Fortunately, I had one, in which he was the depicted hero of the hour; and soon he was entertaining a group with his own amusement over the remarkable presentments of himself on two recent convivial occasions, wherein he was to be seen making his acknowledgments with more gratitude than grace.

A SUN WORSHIPPER.

As we sped down the bay, accompanied by a little tug with an immense white ensign of the German Empire floating almost from stern to stern, sometimes enveloping it like a snow flurry, the clouds grew thinner and thinner, and at one moment seemed about to break away entirely.

"Oh, there's the sun! the sun!" exclaimed Mr. Taylor, as a luminous spot appeared in the sky. He sprung to his feet with half mimic enthusiasm-though, I suspect, really relieved from having been secretly anxious because he was not giving us an unclouded good time all the way-and raising his hat toward it, cried, "Hail! hail!"

Then turning to me, his face radiant, he said, "I am a sun worshipper. Yes, I worship the sun. Don't you?" The momentary impulse to fun took thus suddenly the form of a serious thought. The poet put back the humorist, but so quickly that when he thus plied me with such a sudden piece of paganisn, and apparently in dead earnest, too-as if he had got hold of an important article of faith-it required a little agility with his own to leap at once into the symbolism of "Deukalion"-not then out, I believe-and catch his true meaning. But I did.

Very fittingly, so I thought, after such a mythological outburst, it seemed to occur to him that there was a libation to be poured, and, as it turned out, it was to be a grateful tribute to the sun. "Just as I was coming away," said he, "I received a charming farewell note from Mr. August Belmont, accompanying two bottles of Johannisberg from Prince Metternich's cellar, one of which he wished me to open as I went down the bay and the other when I arrived in Berlin. We'll have the first one now." He had to play the conjurer with it to make it go round among so many, but he poured away in faith and every one received a few thimblefuls of the etherial essence.

"Isn't it wonderful! Isn't it wonderful!" exclaimed he, after tasting it, with the same earnest elocution that he had put into everything. It was. There was no other word for it, even to my unsophisticated palate. It was a glorious Rhine, flavored with sunbeams. Then began he to give cumulative illustration of its magical potency. Off he broke into a mock rhapsody over the sky, the bay and the shore. Higher and higher flew his flourishes, as he would have it that the very genius of inspiration had taken, possession of him. Then, after a pause, he took another sip. It operated instantly. Springing forward, he gazed excitedly over the side, as if under a hallucination, exclaiming, "Don't you see the gold fish jumping out of the water?" Then came a brief relapse. Soon he applied his lips again. This time it produced a paroxysm of physical energy. He pretended to be preternaturally invigorated, and weilding a mighty arm, he exclaimed, in deep, guttural tones, "I could draw out Leviathan with a hook!" Those who can remember Mr. Taylor's simple and modest oratory of twenty years ago will be as much surprised at this as I was, although it is impossible to suggest the tones which gave full emphasis to this varied evolution of wit. But he was a man who was growing all over.

The bottle survives the little scene to be a precious souvenir now. It was given to Mr. Jervis McEntee, the artist, who wrapped it carefully in that day's Tribune and stowed it in the capacious side pocket of his overcoat. I can fancy the place it holds in his household now.

PRISONERS ON THE DEEP.

The movements of our fleet began to puzzle us just at this time. The little tug came panting on behind, but our leviathan would not stop. The tide was hastening out and so it seemed must the steamer if it would cross the bar and not remain a prisoner. It took the risk of one scrape in order not to get into another. But scrape it did, nevertheless, and just barely made its way into the unfathomable. We were outside the Hook before it did stop. The tug came alongside and the moment for parting was at hand. One by one we sought Mr. Taylor, who, with his wife and daughter, was now standing on deck abaft.

Among the twenty or thirty of us I had noticed a lady of singularly refined and attractive appearance, whose animation of face and manner had enlivened the whole party. It was Mrs. McEntee. She was the first to approach Mr. Taylor, and, looking up with happy face into his, he caught the affectionate signal and kissed her. It proved to be a goodby from another shore on the expanse of a wider sea. With pathetic interest did the little incident come back to me a few months ago when the sad news appeared in the public prints that she was dead. Even then, with broken health, through her devotion to her husband during a severe illness, she was on the verge of the same great change which was also to overtake her friend.

The farewells over, we thronged for the tug, but it was a tug of war. Steamer and tender could not come to a mutual accommodation. The captain of the one looked down upon the delay with German phlegm, while the skipper of the other raged and stormed from his wheelhouse. Once more sidling up, smash went his paddlebox; after that he wheeled about and left us riding on the swell. As the tug turned about and put her nose into the fog, lo! on her after deck a sumptuous collation was revealed, the handsome provision of Mr. Shumacker, the German Consul General, whose guests we were. A loud howl and groan of anguish and despair rose from among us as the good things drew tantalizingly further and further away. There was no hope of her return; was there now any of ours? At all events we were in for a night as well as a day on the deep. The steamer dropped anchor and there we rocked till daylight.

MARK TWAIN APPEARS.

We all went back into the ante-goodby condition. Just before sundown, while a group of us were standing together on deck, Mark Twain suddenly appeared from below.

"Why, Clemmens, where have you been all this time?" exclaimed Mr. Taylor. "Why were you not here to have some of the wonderful Johannisberg, &c., &c.-- two bottles from Prince Metternich's cellar, sent me, with a charming note, by Mr. Belmont. How sorry I am, &c., &c. If I had only known, &c., &c."

All eyes turned sympathizingly upon poor Twain, as if he had missed the opportunity of his life. Mr. Taylor continued his expression of regret.

"Well," drawled Twain at last, after waiting for Mr. Taylor to run himself out in trying to aggravate him to the utmost. "We-ll-there-were-two-bottles-you-say. If-you-are-so-sorry-and-so-un-hap-py-a-bout-it-why-don't-you-give-me-some-from-the-other-bot-tle?" (A shout of laughter.)

Mr. Taylor drew himself solemnly up. "No," he said, with ferver, "there is a limit to friendship, even to my regard for you, Mr. Twain. I must draw the line somewhere, and I draw it on that bottle. By the way"-eagerly, as if trying to divert his mind from the subject-"when did you hear from Otto?"

"Ot-to?" said Twain, as puzzled for the moment as the rest of us, and wary of some snare that Mr. Taylor was laying for him. "Who's Otto? I-don't-know-any-Ot-to!"

"Why, Bismarck!" said Mr. Taylor, impatiently, "You know you correspond with him constantly."

"Bismarck!" said Twain, in a tone of disgust and contempt, "I-nev-er-call-him-Ot-to! I-al-ways-call-him-'Biz'-my-dear-'Biz,' when-I-write-and-when-I-last-wrote,-I-was-so-par-tic-u-lar-a-bout-it-that-Isaid-at-the-close,-'Yours-tru-ly. This-means-'Biz.'"

This was the opening of a set-to, kept up amid applauding merriment until the bottle of badinage was exhausted.

VIS-A-VIS ON DECK.

After night had closed in and most had gone below I was wandering about the deck, when I came upon Mr. Taylor, sitting alone in a steamer chair, apparently musing. The detention was of some moment to him, as he was timed for Berlin, and wanted a day or two in London. He drew up a chair for me and I sat down beside him. There had been all along something so striking and picturesque in his present position as the United States Minister to the Germain Empire, as the crown of a noble and laborious life, begun so humbly and yet arriving at this remarkable consummation, that now I said, "Don't you feel like looking through this, the big end of the binocular, back to that day, thirty and more years ago, when you sailed out unknown and on an all-uncertain sea, for 'views' afoot' abroad?"

"No," said he, "I never do, I don't like to. I never look back. We ought not to look back, but always forward, always in the future, toward what we may yet become. I hope to do more than I have ever yet done. I want to achieve something more worthy."

I remembered his saying something of the same kind to me many years ago. "People think I am a mere traveller, restless only to see, as if I had a sort of St. Vitus' dance. But I have always had more in my mind than that, I have always had a deeper purpose than to skim over the surface of a country or the different modes of human life." Time has shown that he had. His wonderment was profound over the mystery and problem of human existence. His desire was to get at the philosophic heart of things, and his greatest ambition was to give fit poetic expression, as the highest form of utterance, to what he had learned after much and close communion with life.

After talking a while further in this vein we went below. He lingered about us for a few moments, but at last said, "I don't feel at all well. I believe I am going to have a chill. I had better get to bed as soon as possible." With a good night, but not a goodby, he closed his stateroom door, and we saw him no more. The long excitement he had undergone from the time of his appointment had at last exhausted him, though his bouyant manner had, until now, concealed every evidence of it.

MURAT HALSTEAD'S DILEMMA.

The night grew weary to us as it wore on. Some wrapped themselves in blankets and made Procrustian figures of themselves on the short sofas. Others sat about and talked. Mr. Murat Halstead, who had come on board to see his wife and daughter comfortably on their voyage, on finding them feeling desolate