part of his being,
closer to him than wife or child. The boy sang--

"But I can't forget, until I die
Ole Massa an' de blue-tailed fly."

Stanton's eyes filled with hot tears. He had not wept since his daughter
died.

The breathing from the bed was growing faint. Suddenly the
Surgeon-General held up his hand. He felt the heart and shook his head.
"Fetch your mother," he said to Robert Lincoln. The minister had dropped
on his knees by the bedside and was praying.

"The President is dead," said the Surgeon-General, and at the words it
seemed that every head in the room was bowed on the breast.

Stanton took a step forward with a strange appealing motion of the arms.
It was noted by more than one that his pale face was transfigured.

"Yesterday he was America's," he cried. "Our very own. Now he is all the
world's.... Now he belongs to the ages."

EPILOGUE

Mr. Francis Hamilton, an honorary attache of the British Embassy, stood
on the steps of the Capitol watching the procession which bore the
President's body from the White House to lie in state in the great
Rotunda. He was a young man of some thirty summers, who after a
distinguished Oxford career was preparing himself with a certain
solemnity for the House of Commons. He sought to be an authority
on Foreign affairs, and with this aim was making a tour among the
legations. Two years before he had come to Washington, intending to
remain for six months, and somewhat to his own surprise had stayed on,
declining to follow his kinsman Lord Lyons to Constantinople. Himself a
staunch follower of Mr. Disraeli, and an abhorrer of Whiggery in all its
forms, he yet found in America's struggle that which appealed both to
his brain and his heart. He was a believer, he told himself, in the
Great State and an opponent of parochialism; so, unlike most of his
friends at home, his sympathies were engaged for the Union. Moreover he
seemed to detect in the protagonists a Roman simplicity pleasing to a
good classic.

Mr. Hamilton was sombrely but fashionably dressed and wore a gold
eyeglass on a black ribbon, because he fancied that a monocle adroitly
used was a formidable weapon in debate. He had neat small sidewhiskers,
and a pleasant observant eye. With him were young Major Endicott
from Boston and the eminent Mr. Russell Lowell, who, as Longfellow's
successor in the Smith Professorship and one of the editors of The North
American Review, was a great figure in cu