Mr. Medill, as was well known, was not an admirer of President Harrison, and there came down into our world an evidence of the fact in a story which Mr. Frank Brooks, a political writer on the _Tribune_, told us. It was at the time that President Harrison made one of those speaking tours which, beginning with President Johnson’s “swing around the circle,” have grown increasingly familiar to those of the electorate who observe their presidents and rush to the railway station to hear them speaking as they flash by. His managing editor had assigned Mr. Brooks to go to Galesburg, catch the President’s special and make the journey with him, and just as he was giving directions as to the column or two which Mr. Brooks was to send in daily, Mr. Medill went shuffling through the editorial room, bearing a great pile of those foreign exchanges he was so fond of reading. The managing editor explained to Mr. Medill the mission he was committing to Mr. Brooks, and the old editor stood a moment looking at them, then raised his ear-trumpet and said in his queer voice: “What did you say?” “I said, I’d just been telling Mr. Brooks to go down to Galesburg to-night, catch the President’s special, and send us a column or so each night of his speeches.” “Uh-huh,” said Mr. Medill, and then he drily added: “_What for?_” IX It was, of course, for a young correspondent who hod an eager curiosity about life, an interesting experience to go on a journey like that, and it was with delight that, one snowy morning in the late autumn of that year, I left Chicago to go on a little trip down through Indiana with James G. Blaine. He was the secretary of state in President Harrison’s cabinet, a position in which, as it turned out, he was unhappy, as most men are apt to be in public positions, though a sort of cruel and evil fascination will not let them give up the vain pursuit of them, vainest perhaps when they are won. When I reached the station that morning, Mr. Blaine was already there, walking up and down the platform arm in arm with his son Emmons. He was a gray man, dressed in gray clothes, with spats made of the cloth of his habit, and there was about him an air of vague sadness, which in his high countenance became almost a pain, though just then, in the companionship of the son he loved, there was, for a little while, the expression of a mild happiness, maybe a solace. His face was of a grayish, almost luminous pallor, and his silver hair and beard were in the same key. William Walter Phelps, then our minister to Germany, was traveling with him, and on our way down to South Bend the constant entrance of plain citizens from the other coaches into our car filled Mr. Phelps with a kind of wonder. Commercial travelers, farmers, all sorts and conditions of men, entered and introduced themselves to Mr. Blaine, and he sat and talked with them all in that simplicity which marks the manners, even if it has departed the spirit of the republic.