ceremony was to
take place, Lafayette saw that various gentlemen were carefully
lifting some little children over the rough places where soil from
excavations and piles of cut stone had been heaped, and were helping
them to safe places where they could see and hear. He at once alighted
from the carriage and came forward to assist in this work.

Without suspecting it in the least, he was making another historic
minute; for one of the boys he was thus to lift over a hard spot was a
five-year-old child who afterwards became known to the world as Walt
Whitman. Lafayette pressed the boy to his heart as he passed him along
and affectionately kissed his cheek. Thus a champion of liberty from
the Old World and one from the New were linked in this little act of
helpfulness. When he was an old man, Whitman still treasured the
reminiscence as one of indescribable preciousness.

"I remember Lafayette's looks quite well," he said; "tall, brown, not
handsome in the face, but of fine figure, and the pattern of
good-nature, health, manliness, and human attraction."

Through nearly all of this long and exciting journey, Lafayette was
accompanied by Colonel Francis Kinloch Huger, by his secretary, and by
his son, George Washington Lafayette, then a man full grown. The
latter was almost overcome by the warmth of his father's reception.
Writing to a friend at home, after having been in America but twenty
days, he said:

"Ever since we have been here my father has been the hero, and we the
spectators, of the most imposing, beautiful, and affecting sights; the
most majestic population in the world welcoming a man with common
accord and conducting him in triumph throughout a journey of two
hundred leagues. Women wept with joy on seeing him, and children
risked being crushed to get near to a man whom their fathers kept
pointing out to them as one of those who contributed the most in
procuring them their happiness and independence. This is what it has
been reserved to us to see. I am knocked off my feet--excuse the
expression--by the emotions of all kinds that I experience."

Lafayette has been accused of being a spoiled hero. In a moment of
asperity Jefferson had alluded to Lafayette's love of approbation. If,
indeed, Lafayette did yield to that always imminent human frailty, and
if Olmuetz had not been able to eradicate or subdue it, the itinerary
of 1824 must have been to him a period of torture. He must have
suffered from satiety to a