told me that it was the quickest scheme for extinguishing life ever
invented--patented Anno Christi Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five. Verily we
live in the age of the Push-Button! And as I sat there I heard a laugh
that was a quaver, and the sound of a stout cane emphasizing a jest struck
against the stone floor.

"We didn't have such things when I was a boy!" came the tremulous voice.

And then the newcomer explained to me that he was eighty-seven years old
last May, and that he well remembered a time when a plain oaken gallows
and a strong rope were good enough for Auburn--"provided Bill Seward
didn't get the fellow free," added my new-found friend.

Then the old man explained that he used to be a guard on the walls, and
now he had a grandson who occupied the same office, and in answer to my
question said he knew Seward as though he were a brother. "Bill, he was
the luckiest man ever in Auburn--he married rich and tumbled over bags of
money if he just walked on the street. He believed in neither God nor
devil and had a pompous way o' makin' folks think he knew all about
everything. To make folks think you know is just as well as to know, I
s'pose!" and the old man laughed and struck his cane on the echoing floor
of the cell.

The sound and the place and the company gave me a creepy feeling, and I
excused myself and made my way out past armed guards, through doorways
where iron bars clicked and snapped, and steel bolts that held in a
thousand men shot back to let me out, out into a freer air and a better
atmosphere. And as I passed through the last overhanging arch where a
one-armed guard wearing a G.A.R. badge turned a needlessly big key, there
came unbeckoned across my inward sight a vision of a check-aproned girl in
tears, sobbing with head on desk. And I said to myself: "Yes, yes! country
girl or statesman, you shall drink the bitter potion that is the penalty
of success--drink it to the very dregs. If you would escape moral and
physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing--court
obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie."

All mud sticks, but no mud is immortal, and that senile fling at the name
of Seward is the last flickering, dying word of detraction that can be
heard in the town that was his home for full half a century, or in the
land he served so well. And yet it was in Auburn that mob spirit once
found a voice; and when Seward was Lincoln's most helpful adviser, and his
sons were at t