ng as compared with the grey heads about him. His
image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now--a face
strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead
whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth. His trunk was
disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably
short. The wits used to describe him as the statesman "with coat-tails
very near the ground." It is worth while to remark on this physical
peculiarity because it was the direct opposite of Lincoln's
configuration. He, while comparatively short-bodied, had, as all the
world knows, an abnormal length of limb, a fact which I suppose will
account for much of his ungainly manner. In an ordinary chair he was
undoubtedly uncomfortable, and hence his familiar attitude with his
feet on the table or over the mantelpiece. The two fought each other
long and sternly on those memorable platforms in Illinois in 1858, and
in their physique there must have been, as they stood side by side,
a grotesque parody of their intellectual want of harmony. Douglas's
usual sobriquet was "the little giant," and it fitted well--a man
of stalwart proportions oddly "sawed off." His voice was vibrant and
sonorous, his mien compelling. It was no great speech, a few sentences
of compliment to the city and of good-natured banter of the political
foes among whom he found himself; but it was _ex pede Herculem_,
a leader red-blooded to the finger-tips. I treasure the memory of this
brief touch into which I once came with Douglas for I have come to
think more kindly of him as he has receded. Not a few will now admit
that, taken generally, his doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" was
right. Congress ought not to have power to fix a status for people of
future generations. If a status so fixed becomes repugnant it will be
repudiated, and rightfully. Douglas was certainly cool over the woes
of the blacks; but he refused, it is said, to grow rich, when the
opportunity offered, from the ownership of slaves or from the proceeds
of their sale. His rally to the side of Lincoln at last was finely
magnanimous and it was a pleasant scene, at the inauguration of March
4, 1861, when Douglas sat close by holding Lincoln's hat. There was
an interview between the two men behind closed doors, on the night the
news of Sumter came, of which one would like to have a report. Lincoln
came out from it to issue, through the Associated Press, his call
for troops, and