w them. It was a glorious way of spending
money. Men sometimes give their money away because they have to give it
up anyhow. Such men rarely give it to book-building.

In January, 1881, Mr. George L. Seavey, a prominent Brooklyn man at that
time, gave $50,000 to the library of the Historical Society of New York.
Attending a reception one night in Brooklyn, I was shown his check, made
out for that purpose. It was a great gift, one of the first given for
the intellectual food of future bookworms.

Most of the rich men of this time were devoting their means to making
Senators. The legislatures were manufacturing a new brand, and turning
them out made to order. Many of us were surprised at how little timber,
and what poor quality, was needed to make a Senator in 1881. The nation
used to make them out of stout, tall oaks. Many of those new ones were
made of willow, and others out of crooked sticks. In most cases the
strong men defeated each other, and weak substitutes were put in. The
forthcoming Congress was to be one of commonplace men. The strong men
had to stay at home, and the accidents took their places in the
government. Still there were leaders, North and South.

My old friend Senator Brown of Georgia was one of the leaders of the
South. He spoke vehemently in Congress in the cause of education. Only a
few months before he had given, out of his private purse, forty thousand
dollars to a Baptist college. He was a man who talked and urged a hearty
union of feeling between the North and the South. He always hoped to
abolish sectional feeling by one grand movement for the financial,
educational, and moral welfare of the Nation. It was my urgent wish that
President Garfield should invite Senator Brown to a place in his
Cabinet, although the Senator would probably have refused the honour,
for there was no better place to serve the American people than in the
American Senate.

During the first week in February, 1881, the world hovered over the
death-bed of Thomas Carlyle. He was the great enemy of all sorts of
cant, philosophical or religious. He was for half a century the great
literary iconoclast. Daily bulletins of the sick-bed were published
world-wide. There was no easy chair in his study, no soft divans. It was
just a place to work, and to stay at work. I once saw a private letter,
written by Carlyle to Thomas Chalmers. The first part of it was devoted
to a eulogy of Chalmers, the latter part descriptive of his own