eciate the
stability and reserve of his nature. In a Milestone beyond this, I have
recalled a conversation I had with him at the White House, and recorded
my impressions of him. Above the clamour of these troublesome times, I
raised my voice and said that in the distant years to come the electors
of New York, Alabama, and Maine, and California, would march together
down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington for the discharge of the great
duties of the Electoral College.

The storm passed, and the Democrats were in power. It was the calm that
follows an electrical disturbance. The paroxysm of filth and moral death
was over.

Mr. Vanderbilt, converted into a philanthropist, gave five hundred
thousand dollars to a medical institute, and the world began to see new
possibilities in great fortunes. That a railroad king could also be a
Christian king was a hopeful tendency of the times. These were the acts
that tended to smother the activities of Communism in America.

In the previous four years the curious astronomer had discovered the
evolution of a new world in the sky, and so while on earth there were
convulsions, in the skies there were new beauties born. With the rising
sun of the year 1885, one of our great and good men of Brooklyn saw it
with failing eyesight. Doctor Noah Hunt Schenck, pastor of St. Ann's
Episcopal Church, was stricken. For fifteen years he had blessed our
city with his benediction. The beautiful cathedral which grew to its
proportions of grandeur under Doctor Schenck's pastorate, stood as a
monument to him.

A few weeks later Schuyler Colfax, speaker of the House of
Representatives, passed on. In the vortex of political feeling his
integrity was attacked but I never believed a word of the accusations.
Ten millions of people hoped for his election as President. He was my
personal friend. When the scandal of his life was most violent, he
explained it all away satisfactorily in my own house. This explanation
was a confidence that I cannot break, but it made me ever afterwards a
loyal friend to his memory. He was one of those upon whom was placed the
burden of living down a calumny, and when he died Congress adjourned in
his honour. Members of the legislature in his own country gathered about
his obsequies. I have known many men in public life, but a more lovable
man than Schuyler Colfax I never knew. The generous words he spoke of me
on the last Sabbath of his life I shall never forget. The perpetual
sm