tracted illness. It will be remembered that
in the correspondence between General Harrison as President-elect and
Mr. Blaine, when the Secretaryship of State was offered and accepted,
there appeared harmony of views concerning Pan-Americanism; that Mr.
Blaine enjoyed the office and that his official labors during the
Harrison Administration were of the highest distinction, showing
his happiest characteristics. The difference as to duties that arose
between the President and the Secretary was forgotten, and their
mutual sympathies abounded, when there came upon them, in their
households, the gravest, tenderest sorrows.

[Illustration: BLAINE'S GRAVE AT WASHINGTON, D.C. THE TREE AT THE LEFT
MARKS THE HEAD OF THE GRAVE, AND THE FIRST OF THE THREE LOW STONES IN
THE FOREGROUND, NUMBERING FROM THE LEFT, MARKS THE FOOT.

From a photograph by Miss F.B. Johnston.]

When Mr. Blaine was for the last time in New York on his way to
Washington, stopping as was his habit at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,
he asked me to walk with him to his room, fronting on Twenty-third
Street, on the parlor floor; and he slowly, as if it were a task,
unlocked the door. There was a sparkle of autumnal crispness in
the air, and he had a fire, that glittered and threw shadows about
fitfully. There was not much to say. It was plain at last that Mr.
Blaine was fading, that he had within a few weeks failed fast. His
great, bright eyes were greater than ever, but not so bright. His face
was awfully white; not that brainy pallor that was familiar--something
else! He seated himself in the light of the fire, on an easy-chair.
There was a knock at his door, and a servant handed him a card, and
he said: "No;" and we were alone. I could not think of a word of
consolation; and in a moment he appeared to have forgotten me, and
stared in a fixed, rapt dream at the flickering flame in the grate.
It occurred to me to get up and go away quietly, as conversation was
impossible--for there was too much to say. It came to me that I ought
not to leave him alone. Something in him reminded me of the mystical
phrases of the transcendent paragraph of his oration on Garfield,
picturing the death of the second martyred President, by the ocean,
while far off white ships touched the sea and sky, and the fevered
face of the dying man felt "the breath of the eternal morning."

Some weeks earlier Mr. Blaine and I had had a deep talk about men and
things, and he was very kind, and his bou