Herrick Comes Home

It was a mournful morning. The chill air held a thin mist as the French cruiser Tourville, escorted by the U. S. cruisers Marblehead and Cincinnati, passed Ambrose Lightship, moved somberly through Quarantine and up New York Harbor. On her quarterdeck, under the after gun turret, rested a flag-draped coffin of rosewood. Within the coffin lay the body of Myron Timothy Herrick, late U. S. Ambassador to France, going home.

The grey harbor waters, usually strident with ship whistles, were muffled to a low-breathing hush, which was broken heavily by a 21-gun salute from Governor's Island. At the French Line pier in Manhattan, La Tourville docked gingerly, took aboard great men in black clothes to stand, lost in their own thoughts, about the casket. On a mulberry-colored cushion rested the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Col. Charles Augustus Lindbergh stood there, his shoulders drooped in memory of Le Bourget, Paris, 1927. At sharp noon a bugle shrilled. Fifteen wiry French sailors lifted the coffin, carried it cautiously down the green-carpeted gangplank, through the purple-and-black draped pier to a black caisson drawn by six horses. As if freighted with the sorrow of two nations, the casket became unmanageably heavy. In 30 hands it swayed perilously. Others leaped forward and with much straining helped to hoist it into position on the caisson. Bands took up the doleful beat of a funeral march. Soldiers, sailors and citizens, the cortege moved east through old Chelsea. To the curbs from tenements and factories packed workingmen, old men, shawled grandmothers, women with babies. "There's Lindy!" went up an eager cry. Col. Lindbergh pulled down the window-shade of his limousine. The procession wove its slow way through Manhattan streets to the Grand Central Terminal, where the coffin was placed aboard a special train, carried to Cleveland for interment.

* Flying from Mexico City to New York in three days for the Herrick funeral, Col. Lindbergh, No. i TJ. S. Hero, landed at Boiling Field, Washington, tarried 15 minutes. Across the watery field rushed worshipful crowds to greet him. Impatient, he taxied away, halting near a great mudpuddle. When the crowd approached again, he raced his motor sharply. In doing so he splashed dirty water over newsgatherers, photographers, admiring women. Said the Washington Daily News, in an editorial captioned "Lindbergh Splashes Mud on Himself": 'We'd like to tell the boy where he gets off but we doubt if it would serve any good purpose. . . . We would like ... to prepare him for the inevitable day when his popularity will have turned to unpopularity. . . . People with warts on their faces learn to bear their crosses bravely. People who become popular heroes should do the same."