One evening before the death of General Baker, at one of the parties in my quarters on Capitol Hill, General Hancock himself being among my visitors and guests, I induced the accomplished Senator from California to read for me the beautiful verses written by him some years before; and if the reader can recall the life of the handsome Senator and his untimely fate, he may conceive the impression which these beautiful lines made upon the company:

"TO A WAVE.”

"Dost thou seek a star, with thy swelling breast,
Oh! wave that leavest thy mother's breast?
Dost thou leap from the prisoned depths below,

In scorn of their calm and constant flow?
Or art thou seeking some distant land,
To die in murmurs upon the strand?

Hast thou tales to tell of the pearl-lit deep,
Where the wave-whelmed mariner rocks in sleep?
Canst thou speak of navies that sunk in pride,
Ere the roll of their thunder in echo died?
What trophies, what banners are floating free
In the shadowy depths of that silent sea?

It were vain to ask, as thou rollest afar,
Of banner, or mariner, ship, or star;
It were vain to seek in thy stormy face
Some tale of the sorrowful past to trace.
Thou art swelling high, thou art flashing free;
How vain are the questions we ask of thee.

I, too, am a wave on a stormy sea;

I, too, am a wanderer driven like thee;

I, too, am seeking a distant land

To be lost and gone ere I reach the strand.

For the land I seek is a waveless shore,

And they who once reach it shall wander no more,

CHAPTER II.

THE WAR.

WIN

INFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK'S father was in the best sense of the word an honest, upright lawyer, and much of the General's easy speech and pleasing address grew from his home tuition. "The boy is father to the man:" and the aptitudes that come from such association are always felt for good or evil. Receptive in a large degree, no word dropped from the lawyer was lost in the waiting ears of his eager boy; and when Benjamin F. Hancock described the romantic career of these travelling, and preaching, and fighting Muhlenbergs, he found greedy listeners in his three sons. To this day they are the unforgotten memories of the Trappe, where their family settled, and several of their posterity lived, loved, and died. David Rittenhouse was another household idol, and his memoirs filled a large space in

the family annals. These were followed by the story of the honorable life of Francis R. Shunk, the German Governor of Pennsylvania, and his cotemporaries. Such characters, all of them national and renowned, including the gossip of the veterans of two wars, rapidly formed a broad and general philosophy in the mind of the young cadet. Here we discover why in after life General Hancock fought for the Union without hatred for the South, and why he remained to the end a member of the Democratic party. It was his constant presence in the army that kept him out of party politics at home, and it was his recollection of the lessons of home that made him ready at any time to die for the Union. Grant became a Republican in 1868 because he was forced into civil life. Had he remained in the army he would have been as judicial in his relations to party as Sherman or George H. Thomas; and it is history that when General Grant was first approached to accept the Presidency, the only fear of the Republicans was that the Democrats would get him first. Twelve years ago the most popular and available men to the Republican politicians were the Democrats who had co-operated with the Republicans. That was only four years after the Rebellion was crushed, and they were fearful that they had no man but Grant to save them. Now when peace and oblivion to gratitude have come, the same Republican po liticians throw Grant over-board, and falsely insist

that Hancock will ruin the country, because he remains a Democrat, exactly what Grant was before he consented to run for the same office in 1867. In that In that year when I wrote out the record of General Grant on politics, the Republican leaders were ready to take him on any platform if only he would save the Presidency for them. The year after that, 1868, they feared that Andrew Johnson had so utterly demoralized their party, that nobody could save it but Grant. They were literally begging at his feet for his consent. He was indifferent to the place, and so content with his position at the head of the army, that it was only when he saw they had no other place to go that he yielded to their importunities. They had none of the fear about his Democracy they now express about the Democracy of Hancock. His soldier record was all the platform they wanted. His old Democracy would please the Democrats of the North, and his magnanimity to Lee at Appomattox in 1865, would please the South. That was all they asked in 1868. Now everything is forgotten, including his services to them in 1872 when he defeated Greeley for them, and they fly into a passion because the Democrats have done what they did, take a Union soldier on his Union record alone. And in this the Confederates give the very best guarantee of Democratic fidelity to that Union, and to all the resulting obligations in the Constitution of the United States.

Nothing in the history of our civil war is more interesting than the supposed opinions of the officers of the regular army. General McClel lan had to suffer from the suspicion industriously encouraged by his adversaries, that he was a Democrat, and although his father, a celebrated doctor, George B. McClellan of Philadelphia, was an active old line whig, and in 1844 one of the idolaters of Henry Clay, yet the circumstance that his son had been educated at West Point led a large number of the extreme anti-slavery politicians at Washington, to class him among the Democrats; and it was a fashionable thing at that time, to insist that every regular was either doubtful or disloyal. However unjust this suspicion, it was much encouraged by the withdrawal from the service, on the plea of State Rights, of men like Robert E. Lee, Joe Johnson, Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson, John B. Magruder, and many more, all, or most of them, West Point men. At the same time it opened the door to the admission of much other material, men who tried to compensate for their inferior military experience by their somewhat noisy political professions. General McClellan soon found himself among a nest of hornets, and it is simple justice to say, that many of his misfortunes, alike as a soldier and a statesman, resulted from the political intrigues and misrepresentations by which he was surrounded. I resided at Washington during all the