ination, he said:
'Only think of this! I am yet a young man? if elected and I serve my
term I shall still be a young man. Then what am I going to do? There
seems to be no place in America for an ex-President.'

"And then came in what I thought the extreme simplicity and real
nobility of the man. 'Why,' said he, 'I had no thought of being
nominated. I had bought me some new books, and was getting ready for the
Senate.'

"I laughed at the idea of his buying books, like a boy going to college,
and remembered that during his Congressional career he had furnished
materials for a few books himself. And then, with that peculiar roll of
the body and slap on the shoulder with the left hand, which all will
recognize, he said: 'Why! do you know that up to 1856 I never saw a
_Congressional Globe_, nor knew what one was!' And he then explained how
he stumbled upon one in the hands of an opponent in his first public
anti-slavery debate.

"A friend remarked the other day that Garfield would get as enthusiastic
in digging a six-foot ditch with his own hands, as when making a speech
in Congress. Such was my observation. Going down the lane, he seemed to
forget for the time that there was any Presidential canvass pending. He
would refer, first to one thing, then another, with that off-hand
originality which was his great characteristic. Suddenly picking up a
smooth, round pebble, he said, 'Look at that! Every stone here sings of
the sea.'

"Asking why he bought his farm, he said he had been reading about
metals, how you could draw them to a certain point a million times and
not impair their strength, but if you passed that point once, you could
never get them back. 'So,' said he, 'I bought this farm to rest the
muscles of my mind!' Coming to two small wooden structures in the field,
he talked rapidly of how his neighbors guessed he would do in Congress,
but would not make much of a fist at farming, and then called my
attention to his corn and buckwheat and other crops, and said that was a
marsh, but he underdrained it with tile, and found spring-water flowing
out of the bluff, and found he could get a five-foot fall, and with
pumps of a given dimension, a water-dam could throw water back eighty
rods to his house, and eighty feet above it. 'But,' said he, in his
jocularly, impressive manner, 'I did my surveying before I did my
work.'"

This is certainly a pleasant picture of a great man, who has not lost
his simplicity of manner, a