which he had signed the paper, and dismissed me to some
of the happiest hours of my life.

I walked out of the White House dispossessed of office, but now, at
last, a citizen of the Republic. I stood on the steps of the White
House, to look at the city through whose streets I had so many times
wandered in a worried despair, and I saw them with an emotion I would
not dare transcribe. I do not know that the sun was really shining, but
in my memory the scene has taken on all the accumulated brightnesses of
all the radiant days I ever knew in Washington. And I remember that
I saw the Washington Monument and the Capitol with a sense of almost
affectionate personal possession!

In an excited exultation I went to thank the men who had helped us
in the House and the Senate--to wire jubilant messages home--to
send Governor Wells the pen with which the President had signed his
proclamation, and to procure from friends in the War Department the
first two flags that had been made with forty-five stars--the star of
Utah the forty-fifth. Wherever I went, some sinister aspect seemed to
have gone out of things; and I remember that I enjoyed so much the sense
of their new inhostility, that I planned to delay my return to Utah
until I had made a pilgrimage to every spot in Washington where I had
despaired of our future.

All this may seem almost sentimental to you, who perhaps accept your
citizenship as an unregarded commonplace of natural right. But, for me,
the freeing of our people was an emancipation to be compared only to the
enfranchisement of the Southern slaves and greater even than that,
for we had come from citizenship in the older states, and we could
appreciate our deprivation, smart under our ostracism, and resent the
rejection that set us apart from the rest of the nation as an inferior
people unfit for equal rights.

I sat down to my dinner, that evening, with the appetite that comes
from a day of fasting and emotional excitement; and I recall that I was
planning a visit of self-congratulation to Arlington, for the morrow,
when one of the hotel bell-boys brought me a telegram. I opened it
eagerly--to enjoy the expected message of felicitation from home.

It was in cipher, and that fact gave me a pause of doubt, since the
days of political mysteries and their cipher telegrams were over for us,
thank God! It was signed with President Woodruff's cipher name.

I went to my room to translate it, and I did not return to m