his back with his hands extended,
weltering in his blood. He had three wounds in the abdomen and his
throat was cut. A hawkbill knife was found near him. A jury of inquest
was held and found a verdict that he had destroyed himself. It was a
melancholy instance of the effects of intemperance. Mr. McConnell when
a youth resided at Fayetteville in my congressional district. Shortly
after he grew up to manhood he was at my instance appointed postmaster
of that town. He was a true Democrat and a sincere friend of mine.

"His family in Tennessee are highly respectable and quite numerous. The
information as to the manner and particulars of his death I learned from
Mr. Voorhies, who reported it to me as he had heard it in the streets.
Mr. McConnell removed from Tennessee to Alabama some years ago, and I
learn he has left a wife and three or four children."

Poor Felix Grundy McConnell! At a school in Tennessee he was a roommate
of my father, who related that one night Felix awakened with a scream
from a bad dream he had, the dream being that he had cut his own throat.

"Old Jack Dade," as he was always called, lived on, from hand to mouth,
I dare say--for he lost his job as keeper of the district prison--yet
never wholly out-at-heel, scrupulously neat in his person no matter how
seedy the attire. On the completion of the new wings of the Capitol and
the removal of the House to its more commodious quarters he was made
custodian of the old Hall of Representatives, a post he held until he
died.

VIII

Between the idiot and the man of sense, the lunatic and the man of
genius, there are degrees--streaks--of idiocy and lunacy. How many
expectant politicians elected to Congress have entered Washington all
hope, eager to dare and do, to come away broken in health, fame and
fortune, happy to get back home--sometimes unable to get away, to linger
on in obscurity and poverty to a squalid and wretched old age.

I have lived long enough to have known many such: Senators who have
filled the galleries when they rose to speak; House heroes living while
they could on borrowed money, then hanging about the hotels begging for
money to buy drink.

There was a famous statesman and orator who came to this at last, of
whom the typical and characteristic story was told that the holder of a
claim against the Government, who dared not approach so great a man with
so much as the intimation of a bribe, undertook by argument to interest
him i