Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

A NEW ENGLAND EDUCATION

17

marked the last oratorical station but one in his predestined course to the presidency. Louis Napoleon was
preparing for his war with Austria. Hawthorne was in
Italy, writing "The Marble Faun."
Memories of old conditions and half-forgotten names
are stirred by this small note of early travel. Transit by
water between Boston and New York was by the Norwich
route, embarking at a point on the Thames River, just
below that town, after a railway journey of five and often
six or more hours by way of Worcester; or from Stonington,
reached by way of Providence. The Bristol, afterward
the Fall River line, came later into my experience. There
have been several Connecticuts plying the Sound; I am not
sure whether this Connecticut ran from Norwich or from
Stonington.
The museum referred to was the collection of Egyptian
antiquities gathered by Doctor Henry Abbott, an English
physician who had lived twenty years in Cairo. It contained objects of importance from Thebes, Sakkara,
Ghizeh, Philae, and elsewhere, and was for that time a
notable and representative exhibit, spoken of, indeed,
as comparable in value, to the student antiquarian or the
theologian, to any similar collection in the world. My
chronic recollection has been that I saw the Egyptian
museum on an upper floor of the Cooper Union, in proximity to the Bryan gallery with its fine Greuze and some
putative Old Masters that might now be regarded by beholders as choice morsels for a Professor Van Dyke. The
Abbott collection had been housed for years at the Stuyvesant Institute on Broadway opposite Bond Street.
It was purchased soon after for the New York Historical
Society, and may have gone directly to that institution,

in the custody of which it still remains. If so, I have been
confusing visits on two different occasions. Better than
the mummied humans, cats, bullocks, and crocodiles and
the Osirian figures, I remember a very kind gentleman in