meet me as my guests at dinner to-night. But if you do not personally
look after this the others will not be there."

I was as badly hurt as any, but a bond is a bond and I did as he
desired, succeeding partly by coaxing and partly by insisting, though it
was devious work.

Frostier conviviality I have never sat down to than Reid's dinner.
Horace White looked more than ever like an iceberg, Sam Bowles was
diplomatic but ineffusive, Schurz was as a death's head at the board;
Halstead and I through sheer bravado tried to enliven the feast.
But they would none of us, nor it, and we separated early and sadly,
reformers hoist by their own petard.

VI

The reception by the country of the nomination of Horace Greeley was
as inexplicable to the politicians as the nomination itself had been
unexpected by the Quadrilateral. The people rose to it. The sentimental,
the fantastic and the paradoxical in human nature had to do with this.
At the South an ebullition of pleased surprise grew into positive
enthusiasm. Peace was the need if not the longing of the Southern heart,
and Greeley's had been the first hand stretched out to the South from
the enemy's camp--very bravely, too, for he had signed the bail bond
of Jefferson Davis--and quick upon the news flashed the response from
generous men eager for the chance to pay something upon a recognized
debt of gratitude.

Except for this spontaneous uprising, which continued unabated in July,
the Democratic Party could not have been induced at Baltimore to
ratify the proceedings at Cincinnati and formally to make Greeley its
candidate. The leaders dared not resist it. Some of them halted, a few
held out, but by midsummer the great body of them came to the front to
head the procession.

He was a queer old man; a very medley of contradictions; shrewd and
simple; credulous and penetrating; a master penman of the school of
Swift and Cobbett; even in his odd picturesque personality whimsically
attractive; a man to be reckoned with where he chose to put his powers
forth, as Seward learned to his cost.

What he would have done with the Presidency had he reached it is not
easy to say or surmise. He was altogether unsuited for official life,
for which nevertheless he had a passion. But he was not so readily
deceived in men or misled in measures as he seemed and as most people
thought him.

His convictions were emotional, his philosophy was experimental; but
there was a certain metho