his memory. 'And then,' said he, 'I
leave the paper in my room and trust to the emergency.' He told me that
when he spoke at the serenade in New York a year ago, he was so pressed
by callers that the only opportunity he had for preparation was, to lock
the door and walk three times around the table, when he was called out
to the balcony to begin. All the world knows what that speech was.

"He was wrapped up in his family. His two boys would come up to the
House just before adjournment, and loiter about his desk with their
books in their hands. After the House adjourned, other members would go
off in cars or carriages, or walk down the avenue in groups. But
Garfield, with a boy on each side of him, would walk down Capitol Hill,
as we would say in the country 'cross-lots,' all three chatting
together on equal terms.

"He said to me one day during the canvass, while the tears came to his
eyes, 'I have done no more in coming up from poverty than hundreds and
thousands of others, but I am thankful that I have been able to keep my
family by my side, and educate my children.'

"He was a man with whom anybody could differ with impunity. I have said
repeatedly, that were Garfield alive and fully recovered, and a dozen of
his intimate friends were to go to him, and advise that Guiteau be let
off, he would say, 'Yes, let him go.' The man positively knew no malice.
And for such a man to be shot and tortured like a dog, and by a dog!

"He was extremely sensitive. I have seen him come into the House in the
morning, when some guerrilla of the press had stabbed him deeper in his
feelings than Guiteau's bullet did in the body, and when he looked
pallid from suffering, and the evident loss of sleep; but he would utter
no murmur, and in some short time his great exuberance of spirits would
surmount it all, and he would be a boy again.

"He never went to lunch without a troop of friends with him. He loved
to talk at table, and there is no gush in saying he talked a God
socially and intellectually. Some of his off-hand expressions were like
a burst of inspiration. Like all truly great men, he did not seem to
realize his greatness. And, as I have said, he would talk as cordially
and confidentially with a child as with a monarch. And I only refer to
his conversations with me because you ask me to, and because I think his
off-hand conversations with any one reveal his real traits best.

"Coming on the train from Washington, after his nom