Our Martyred President ...

privilege to ride with him and learn all that is involved in his beloved Canton, to sit with him on his spacious piazza and look out upon the calm hushed town while we talked of men and events."

Speaking further on Mr. Young makes allusion to the beauAful homelife of Mr. McKinley and his dearly beloved wife. "The McKinley homestead," he says, "is an ideal American home, as its master is an ideal American citizen. Taste, comfort, good books, attractive decorations, the touch of the woman's hand everywhere, for how could there have been an Eden unless Eve had made it so. An atmosphere of gentleness and repose. In spite of the excitement because of the doings at the convention-nobody seemed to be in a hurry; not even Governor McKinley, who, with his shoulders thrown against his easy chair, talks and listenslistens rather than talks-his fine eyes beaming through the smoke of a cigar. The stillest, cosiest, sunniest place in the world, the very birds picking crumbs on the window ledge, as if in a doze, yet the heart of a great nation beating and throbbing towards this modest home in Canton.

"As the news comes over the wires from the convention Mr. McKinley sits in his modest home-the portraits of Washington, Lincoln and Grant above him-and goes from pile to pile of correspondence as though the theme of his letters were orders for iron or suuff and not a diadem richer than ever rested upon an imperial brow-a thoroughly self-contained man, who says precisely what he means to say; never taken at a disadvantage, eminently serious, whether listening or talking his mind upon the one thing that concerns him. You divine in him a capacity for doing business, of hearing what has to be said and closing the conversation. When all that is useful has been said, wit, humor, imagination are not apparent qualities. This man has something

to do and must do it.

"You see in him a man of patience and courtesy. If you are not answered as to your wants you carry away the impression that he is more grieved over your disappointment than you could possibly be. This is something like Henry Clay. He has a quiet, prompt, narrative faculty. We talked much of the war

days of Lincoln, Grant and Sheridan, and he was always luminous and lucid, every detail coming out as though it were an etching. He had served with Sheridan, was in fact the first officer Sheridan addressed when he came upon his beaten command, having ridden that immortal twenty miles, and in all his references to Sheridan and Crook and other famous captains there was a beautiful spirit of loyalty which noted the comradeship of the drum and the bivouac. Mr. McKinley impresses you as one who knows his mind-who would have a host of friends but few of what the world calls chums.

"I noted that his estimates of public men-and few escaped the scrutiny of a long conversation-were invariably academic and impartial-without censure, criticism or feeling. Lincoln, Stanton, Blaine, Grant, Garfield, Arthur, Randall were like so many photographs, and carefully studied and reverently put aside. For no one had he an unkind word. His ruling faculty is justice, wide embracing justice, tempered with kindness.

"I have to say that.when the character of Mr. McKinley shall have been submitted to the political autopsy inseparable from the political canvass, an examination imposed something like a masonic ritual, upon every candidate for the exalted position of President, there is nothing in Mr. McKinley that may not be called genuine and true."

He came from Scotch ancestry, or rather Scotch-Irish, like Jackson, Buchanan and Arthur, His ancestors had a Pennsylvania nurture like those of Blaine, Lincoln and Grant. McKinley's father was a Pennsylvanian; his mother an Allison, a name dear to those who recall and love the names of the Scottish Covenant. He became a Methodist like so many Covenanters, of amiable mood, who settled in the West, and was of course an Abolitionist nourished on the corn of Garrison, Sumner and Wendell Phillips. JAMES RANKIN YOUNG.

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