Upon my return to Iowa after the October election in Indiana I made a speech in the opera house at Oskaloosa, Iowa, and the gallery was filled with colored men, many of them from What Cheer, a mining district near Oskaloosa. I related to them the particulars of my interview with the colored gentleman of Indianapolis. They enjoyed it hugely and gave me rounds of applause, and I told them I hoped that in some respects they would not be like the few that were back in Indiana. After the election of Mr. Garfield, Governor Kirkwood was appointed Secretary of the Interior, and as I had official business before the supreme court that summer I visited Washington City in company with my wife, and spent a pleasant two weeks admiring the wonders of the national capital. Bishop Andrews, of the Methodist Episcopal church, had been for a number of years a resident of Des Moines and our near neighbor on Fourth street, and in company with his excellent wife Mrs. Nourse had a very enjoyable time. Governor Kirkwood also arranged that we should attend a private reception of the President and his wife, and Mrs. Nourse enjoyed the privilege of quite a tete a tete with the President's lady, officially known as the first lady of the land. When my wife bid her good evening she shook hands with her and expressed the hope that she would be very happy in her new position. Mrs. Garfield was rather a sad faced person and responded in a tone almost prophetic, "I hope so. We do not know." Afterwards upon the assassination of Mr. Garfield I was called upon to take part in a meeting held in the Baptist church in Des Moines, commemorating the memory of that excellent man. I found in my wife's scrap book some years afterwards a newspaper clipping containing a report of the remarks I made on that occasion which I here insert: For the past five days our nation has been in mourning and the Christian civilization of the world has sympathized with us in our bereavement. By official proclamations, by public meetings and resolutions, by draping our homes and places of business and houses of worship with the emblems of mourning, we have sought to give expression to our sorrow and to testify our appreciation of our noble dead. Tomorrow the whole nation is to attend upon his burial and the day is set apart as sacred to his memory. And yet with all this we cannot restore the life that has been so wantonly destroyed. Death is inexorable, and we can do nothing for him who has gone out from the shores of time forever. But in a better sense of the word Garfield is not dead. So long as we cherish the manly virtues of which his life was the exponent, so long as we remember the trials and sacrifices of his boyhood, the labors and successes of his riper years, the heroism, faith, fidelity of his life, and the calm triumphant heroism of his death, so long will he live to us and to the nation, and so long may we be profited by his life.