r I became President, Senator Quay called upon me,
told me he had known me very slightly, that he thought most men who
claimed to be reformers were hypocrites, but that he deemed me sincere,
that he thought conditions had become such that aggressive courage
and honesty were necessary in order to remedy them, that he believed I
intended to be a good and efficient President, and that to the best
of his ability he would support me in it making my Administration a
success. He kept his word with absolute good faith. He had been in the
Civil War, and was a medal of honor man; and I think my having been in
the Spanish War gave him at the outset a kindly feeling toward me.
He was also a very well-read man--I owe to him, for instance, my
acquaintance with the writings of the Finnish novelist Topelius. Not
only did he support me on almost every public question in which I was
most interested--including, I am convinced, every one on which he felt
he conscientiously could do so--but he also at the time of his death
gave a striking proof of his disinterested desire to render a service to
certain poor people, and this under conditions in which not only would
he never know if the service were rendered but in which he had no reason
to expect that his part in it would ever be made known to any other man.

Quay was descended from a French voyageur who had some Indian blood in
him. He was proud of this Indian blood, took an especial interest in
Indians, and whenever Indians came to Washington they always called on
him. Once during my Administration a delegation of Iroquois came over
from Canada to call on me at the White House. Their visit had in it
something that was pathetic as well as amusing. They represented the
descendants of the Six Nations, who fled to Canada after Sullivan
harried their towns in the Revolutionary War. Now, a century and a
quarter later, their people thought that they would like to come back
into the United States; and these representatives had called upon me
with the dim hope that perhaps I could give their tribes land on which
they could settle. As soon as they reached Washington they asked Quay to
bring them to call on me, which he did, telling me that of course their
errand was hopeless and that he had explained as much to them, but that
they would like me to extend the courtesy of an interview. At the close
of the interview, which had been conducted with all the solemnities of
calumet and wampum, the Indians fi