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CHAPTER XXV.

TWO PEN PORTRAITS.

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IS home is about half-way between Mentor and Willoughby, so that we had but

two miles to drive to the station. About a mile and a half west of his home is a curiosity in the shape of Joe Smith's first Mormon temple. It is a plain, but queer-looking structure, that served its purpose for a while, now only a curiosity almost useless. This, however, did not detain me. It was but a speck in the landscape of a country that was quite attractive and enabled me to realize why the general wished to reside away from the city's bustling walls. His hard student life and the incessant cares of public duty in Washington could all be left behind, and he always hastens to his home when Congress adjourns. The house is sufficiently lonely to be out of the way of idlers or mere curiosity callers, and few would break in upon the rest of the great statesman, unless they were called thither by imperative business. He needs rest and leisure to prepare himself for the winter sessions of Congress at Washington, and from the midst of this beautiful scenery he returns each year to the capital thoroughly invigorated.

My youthful companion spoke eloquently of the general and seemed most anxious to convince me that Garfield was really a great man. I asked him if the general was very popular with the people of that section, and he replied: "Well, I should say so, why they are all going to vote for him." From others I learned about the same thing, and came to the conclusion, that if a man is best judged by the opinions of those among whom he has lived, General Garfield is peculiarly fortunate. From one end of his district to another, among Republicans and Democrats alike, no one speaks of him but in the language of praise, respect, love and admiration. The same statement applies in a large degree to the State. But in his own district, among his old friends and neighbors, he stands as a synonym for all that is manly, good and honest. The reader has mentally photographed him from what I have related above. He is equally interesting as others see him. George Alfred Townsend drew this picture of him in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

"The writer has known General Garfield pretty well for thirteen years. He is a large, well-fed, hale, ruddy, brownbearded man, weighing about two hundred and twenty pounds, with Ohio German colors, blue eyes, military face, erect figure and shoulders, large back and thighs, and broad chest, and evidently bred in the country on a farm. His large mouth is full of strong teeth; his nose, chin and brows are strongly pronounced. A large brain, with room for play of thought and long application, rises high above his

clear, discerning, enjoying eyes. He sometimes suggests a country Samson-strong beyond his knowledge, but unguarded as a school-boy. He pays little attention to the affectation by which some men manage public opinion, and has one kind of behavior for all callers, which is the most natural behavior at hand. Strangers would think him a little cold and mentally shy. On acquaintance he is seen to be hearty above everything, loving the wife around him, his family, his friends, his State and country. Loving, sympathetic and achieving people, and with a large, unprofessing sense of the brotherhood of workers in the fields of progress, it was the feeling of sympathy and the desire to impart which took him for chief, while as to the pulpit, or on the verge of it, full of all that he saw and acquired, he panted to give it forth after it had passed through the alembic of his mind. Endowed with a warm temperament, copious expression, large, wide-seeing faculties and superabundant health, he could study all night or lecture all day, and it was a providence that his neighbors discovered that he was too much of a man to conceal in the pulpit, where his docility and reverence had almost taken him. They sent him to the State Legislature, where he was when the war broke out, and he immediately went to the field, where his courage and painstaking parts and love of open-air occupation, and perfect freedom from self-assertion made him the delight of Rosecrans and George H. Thomas successively. He would go about any work they asked of him; was unselfish and enthusiastic, and had steady, temperate habits, and his large brain and reverence made everything novel to him.

"There is an entire absence of nonchalance or worldliness in his nature. He is never indifferent, never vindictive. A base action or ingratitude or cruelty may make him sad, but does not provoke retaliation or alter that faith in men or Providence which is a part of his sound stomach and athletic head. Garfield is as simple as a child; to the serpent's wisdom he is a stranger. Having no use nor aptitude with the

weapons of coarser natures, he often avoids mere disputes, does not go to the public resorts where men are familiar or vulgar, and the walk from his home in Washington to the Capitol, and an occasional dinner out, comprise his life. The word public servant especially applies to him. He has been the drudge of his State constituents, the public, the public societies and the moral societies of his party and country, since 1863. Aptitude for public debate and public affairs are associated with a military nature in him. He is on a broad scale a school-master of the range of Gladstone, of Agassiz, of Gallatin.

"With as honest a heart as ever beat, above the competitors of sordid ambition, General Garfield has yet so little of the worldly wise in him that he is poor, and yet has been accused of dishonesty. He has no capacity for investment, nor the rapid solution of wealth, nor profound respect for the penny in and out of pound, and still, is neither careless, improvident nor dependent. The great consuming passions to equal richer people and live finely and extend his social power is as foreign to him as scheming or cheating. But he is not a suspicious nor a high-mettled man, and so he is taken in sometimes, partly from his obliging, unrefusing disposition. Men who were scheming imposed upon him as upon Grant and other crudeeyed men of affairs. The people of his district, who are quick to punish public venality or defection, heard him in his defense, in 1873, and kept him in Congress and held up his hand, and hence he is, by their unwavering support for twenty-five years, candidate for president and a national character. Since John Quincy Adams, no president has had Garfield's scholarship, which is equal up to this age of wider facts. The average American, pursuing money all day long, is now presented to a man who had invariably put the business of others above his own, and worked for that alleged nondescript the public gratitude-all his life. But he has not labored without reward. The great nomination came to-day to as pure and loving a man as ever wished well of

anybody and put his shoulder to his neighbor's wheel. Garfield's big, boyish heart is pained to-night with the weight of his obligation, affection and responsibility. To-day, as hundreds of telegrams come from everywhere, saying kind, strong things to him-such messages as only Americans, in their rapid, good impulses, pour upon a lucky friend-he was with two volunteer clerks in a room, opening and reading, and suddenly his two boys sent him one-little fellows at school-and as he read it he broke down, and tried to talk, but his voice choked and he could not see for tears. The clerks began to cry, too, and people to whom they afterward told it. This sense of real great heart will be new to the country, and will grow if he gets the presidency.

"He is the ablest public speaker in the country, and the most serious and instructive man on the stump; his instincts, liberal and right; his courtesy, noticeable in our politics; his aims, ingenuous, and his piety comes by nature. He leads a farmer's life, all the recess of Congress, working like a field hand, and restoring his mind by resting it. If elected, he will give a tone of culture and intelligence to the executive office it has never yet had, while he has no pedantry in his composition, and no conceit whatever."

A more elaborate analysis of the man was made by Professor B. A. Hinsdale, President of Hiram College:

"His power of logical analysis and classification is very great; of rhetorical exposition hardly surpassed. He excels in the patient accumulation of facts, and in striking generalizations. As a student, he loves to roam in every field of activity. He delights in poetry and other works of the imagination; loves the abstruse things of philosophy; takes keen interest in scientific research; gathers into his store-house the facts of history and politics, and throws over it all the life and