his curiosity any longer and said:
"Governor, what is that you are drinking?"

The governor explained its value and the almost utter impossibility
of securing any.

"Well, governor," said Speaker Husted, "I never saw any before
and I think I will try it." He seized the bottle, emptied it in
his goblet and announced to the astonished executive that he was
quite right in his estimate of its excellence.

The governor lost a bottle of his most cherished treasure but
received from the Republican legislature all the appropriation
he desired for the Executive Mansion.

It has been my good fortune to know well the governors of our
State of New York, commencing with Edmund D. Morgan. With many
of them I was on terms of close intimacy. I have already spoken of
Governors Seymour, Fenton, Dix, Tilden, Cleveland, and Roosevelt.
It might be better to confine my memory to those who have joined
the majority.

Lucius Robinson was an excellent executive of the business type,
as also were Alonzo B. Cornell and Levi P. Morton. Frank S. Black
was in many ways original. He was an excellent governor, but
very different from the usual routine. In the Spanish-American War
he had a definite idea that the National Guard of our State should
not go into the service of the United States as regiments, but
as individual volunteers. The Seventh Regiment, which was the
crack organization of the Guard, was severely criticised because
they did not volunteer. They refused to go except as the Seventh
Regiment, and their enemies continued to assail them as tin soldiers.

General Louis Fitzgerald and Colonel Appleton came to me very
much disturbed by this condition. General Russell A. Alger,
secretary of war, was an intimate friend of mine, and I went to
Washington and saw him and the president on the acute condition
affecting the reputation of the Seventh Regiment.

General Alger said: "We are about to make a desperate assault
upon the fortifications of Havana. Of course there will be many
casualties and the fighting most severe. Will the Seventh join
that expedition?"

The answer of General Fitzgerald and Colonel Appleton was emphatic
that the Seventh would march with full ranks on the shortest possible
notice. Governor Black would not change his view of how the
National Guard should go, and so the Seventh was never called.
It seems only proper that I should make a record of this patriotic
proposition made by this organization.