udacious daring, let us say, of Mr. Elaine,
the energetic self-assertion of Mr. Roosevelt. Either in his place would
have carried all before him.

I repeat that he was never a subtle schemer--sitting behind the screen
and pulling his wires--which his political and party enemies discovered
him to be as soon as he began to get in the way of the machine and
obstruct the march of the self-elect. His confidences were not effusive,
nor their subjects numerous. His deliberation was unfailing and
sometimes it carried the idea of indecision, not to say actual love of
procrastination. But in my experience with him I found that he usually
ended where he began, and it was nowise difficult for those whom he
trusted to divine the bias of his mind where he thought it best to
reserve its conclusions.

I do not think in any great affair he ever hesitated longer than
the gravity of the case required of a prudent man or that he had a
preference for delays or that he clung tenaciously to both horns of
the dilemma, as his training and instinct might lead him to do, and did
certainly expose him to the accusation of doing.

He was a philosopher and took the world as he found it. He rarely
complained and never inveighed. He had a discriminating way of balancing
men's good and bad qualities and of giving each the benefit of a
generous accounting, and a just way of expecting no more of a man than
it was in him to yield. As he got into deeper water his stature rose
to its level, and from his exclusion from the presidency in 1877 to his
renunciation of public affairs in 1884 and his death in 1886 his walks
and ways might have been a study for all who would learn life's truest
lessons and know the real sources of honor, happiness and fame.

Chapter the Thirteenth

Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A
Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore
Thomas

I

Swift's definition of "conversation" did not preside over or direct the
daily intercourse between Charles Sumner, Charles Eames and Robert J.
Walker in the old days in the National Capital. They did not converse.
They discoursed. They talked sententiously in portentous essays and
learned dissertations. I used to think it great, though I nursed no
little dislike of Sumner.

Charles Eames was at the outset of his career a ne'er-do-well New
Englander--a Yankee Jack-of-all-trades--kept at the front by an
excee