gree equal to that of
any presiding officer during my service.

I recollect when he was elected president _pro tempore_, in 1896,
I had been talked of for the place, but he had not heard that I
desired it; and a Republican caucus was held which named him
president. Senator Chandler, for whom I have always had the greatest
respect as a man and as a Senator, after the caucus was held told
Senator Frye that he had heard I had some ambition for the place.
Mr. Frye came at once to my house and to my study and asked me, in
so many words, if I had desired to be president of the Senate. I
replied that I had not, adding that I had had no particular concern
about it at any time. He thereupon asserted that he had called
simply to apprise me that whenever I wanted the position he would
very cheerfully resign and yield it to me. I assured him that if
he did not yield it until I asked him to do so, he would hold it
for a long time. He never had any opposition, and on both sides
of the chamber he was, as presiding officer, equally popular. He
voluntarily relinquished the office at the beginning of the Sixty-
second Congress.

When the tariff was one of the issues--during the first Cleveland,
the Harrison, and the second Cleveland campaigns and to a lesser
degree in 1896 and 1900,--Senator Frye was regarded as one of the
foremost orators and stump speakers on the tariff question. During
his later years it was very much to be regretted that he did not
feel able to take an active part in national campaigns.

The news of Senator Frye's death comes to me while I am engaged in
reading the proof of what I have said about him in this book. He
died at four o'clock on the eighth day of August, 1911, passing
away at the age of eighty-one years. When asked by a newspaper
man for a brief estimate of Mr. Frye's character, I said: "He was
not only one of the ablest and most devoted of public servants,
but one of the most charming men that I have ever known." This
expression I desire to repeat here for perpetuation in endurable
form.

Seldom has this country commanded the services of a more enlightened
or more self-sacrificing man than Mr. Frye. He was patriotic to
the very heart's core; no sacrifice for the country would have been
too great for him. He, and his colleague Mr. Hale, and Senators
Allison, of Iowa, Platt, of Connecticut, Teller, of Colorado,
Cockrell, of Missouri, Morgan, of Alabama, and Spooner, of Wisconsin,
consti