form that he looked upon it with
ravished eyes. It was in this room that he wrote the chapters for his
second book, which was to show especially the part which American
women had played in the making of their country.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE HOME AT ALWINGTON.

It was a remarkable coincidence that Mr. Coffin was to exchange worlds
and transfer his work in the very year in which the issues of the
Civil War were to be eliminated from national politics, when not one
of the several party platforms was to make any allusion to the
struggle of 1861-65, or to any of its numerous legacies. In this year,
1896, also, for the first time since 1860, Southern men, the one a
Confederate general, and the other a Populist editor, were to be
nominated for possible chief magistracy. Mr. Coffin, with prescience,
had already seen that the war issues, grand as they were, had melted
away into even vaster national questions. He had turned his thoughts
towards the solution of problems which concerned the nation as a whole
and humanity as a race. His historical addresses and lectures went
back to older subjects, while his thoughts soared forward to the
newer conditions, theories, and problems which were looming in the
slowly unveiling future. In literature he turned, and gladly, too,
from the scenes of slavery and war between brothers. With his pen he
sought to picture the ancient heroisms, in the story of which the
people of the States of rice and cotton, as well as of granite, ice,
and grain, were alike interested, as in a common heritage. In
Alwington, surrounded by old and new friends, genial and cultured, he
hoped, if it were God's will, to complete his work with a rotunda-like
series of pen pictures of the Revolution.

This was not to be, though he was to die "in harness," like Nicanor of
old, without lingering illness or broken powers. While he was to see
not a few golden days of A. D. 1896, yet the proposed pictures were to
be left upon the easel, scarcely more than begun. The pen and ink on
his table were to remain, like brushes on the palette, with none to
finish as the master-workman had planned.

Months before that date of February 18th, on which their golden
wedding was to be celebrated, Mr. and Mrs. Coffin had secured my
promise that I should be present. Coming on to Boston, I led the
morning worship in the Eliot Church of Newton, which is named after
the apostle of the Indians, the quarter-millennial anniversary of the