Sea and landed at Cairo, where I had to cross the Isthmus by rail. The Suez Canal was not finished; the work of excavating was still going on. Arriving at Alexandria, I took passage from there to Marseilles, the southern port of France, while Haskins and his family took a steamer direct for Southampton. From Marseilles I went to Paris by rail. I was there about ten days, long enough to give me a general idea of the city, its public buildings, churches, gardens, and of Parisian gaiety. I crossed the English channel from Calais to Dover and went thence by rail to London—the first time in my life to touch English soil, and my first visit to the famous metropolis. While in London, I visited Whitworth’s machine shop, and had the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with Thomas Christy, whom I knew in China in the ’50’s. I was about a month in England, and then crossed the Atlantic in one of the Cunard steamers and landed in New York in the early spring of 1864, just ten years after my graduation from Yale and in ample time to be present at the decennial meeting of my class in July. Haskins and his family had preceded me in another steamer for New York, in order that he might get to work on the drawings and specifications of the shop and machinery and get them completed as soon as possble. In 1864, the last year of the great Civil War, nearly all the machine shops in the country, especially in New England, were preoccupied and busy in executing government orders, and it was very difficult to have my machinery taken up. Finally Haskins succeeded in getting the Putnam Machine Co. , Fitchburg, MA , to fill the order.
While Haskins was given sole charge of superintending the execution of the order, which required at least six months before the machinery could be completed for shipment to China, I took advantage of the interim to run down to New Haven and attend the decennial meeting of my class. It was to me a joyous event and I congratulated myself that I had the good luck to be present at our first reunion. Of course, the event that brought me back to the country was altogether unpretentious and had attracted little or no public attention at the time, because the whole