I was passing the summer at Magnolia, on the east coast of Massachusetts, when an old friend, the son of an eminent German-American, came from New York and asked me to become a candidate for the governorship. I was very reluctant, for special as well as general reasons. My first wish was to devote myself wholly to certain long-deferred historical work; my health was not strong; I felt utterly unfitted for the duties of the campaign, and the position of governor, highly honorable as it is, presented no especial attractions to me, my ambition not being in that line. Therefore it was that at first I urged my friends to combine upon some other person; but as they came back and insisted that they could agree on no one else, and that I could bring to the support of the party men who would otherwise oppose it, I reluctantly agreed to discuss the subject with some of the leading Republicans in New York, and among them Mr. Thomas C. Platt, who was at the head of the organized management of the party. In our two or three conversations Mr. Platt impressed me curiously. I had known him slightly for many years; indeed, we had belonged to the same class at Yale, but as he had left it and I had entered it at the beginning of the sophomore year we did not know each other at that period. We had met occasionally when we were both supporting Mr. Conkling, but had broken from each other at the time when he was supporting Mr. Blaine, and I, Mr. Edmunds, for the nomination at Chicago. Our discussion now took a form which somewhat surprised me. The general belief throughout the State was, I think, that Mr. Platt's first question, or, at any rate, his main question, in any such discussion, would be, necessarily, as to the attitude of the candidate toward Mr. Platt's own interests and aspirations. But I feel bound to say that in the discussions between us no such questions were ever asked, approached, or even hinted at. Mr. Platt never asked me a question regarding my attitude toward him or toward his friends; he never even hinted at my making any pledge or promise to do anything or not to do anything with reference to his own interests or to those of any other person; his whole effort was directed to finding what strength my nomination would attract to the party and what it would repel. He had been informed regarding one or two unpopular votes of mine when I was in the State Senate--as for example, that I had opposed the efforts of a powerful sectarian organization to secure the gift of certain valuable landed property from the city of New York; he had also been informed regarding certain review and magazine articles in which I had spoken my mind somewhat freely against certain influences in the State which were still powerful, and it had been hinted to him that my ``Warfare of Science'' chapters might have alienated a considerable number of the more narrow-minded clergymen and their flocks.