He always spoke of the “honest” soldier, and therefore the average enlisted man very naturally felt that somehow George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Ulysses Grant were all well enough in their way, but that you must keep your eye on them, and that the Secretary was the man to put them in their proper place. The Secretary quite rightly omitted to state that generals are apt to carry a responsibility which would iron the average enlisted man flatter than a pair of pressed trousers; he omitted this statement because it would have been the whole truth, and the whole truth is often very tiresome, particularly for a politician. Do not, as you read this, think evil of the Secretary; he had a large family of daughters and sons with whom he was frequently photographed, seated on the vine-clad porch of the old white homestead, and these photographs were at once widely given to the public press. Moreover, his private life was known to be chaste by every lady in the land, though how they ascertained this I am at a loss to explain. He was also a highly gifted man; gifted with the voice that matches a political frock-coat. At will he could make this so impressive, that if he remarked it was a fine day, for the time of year, it convinced the audience that something of the utmost importance had been announced. He was gifted, too, with a face impervious to vulgar scrutiny, and he had the most deeply religious chinbeard in Apple-Jack county. I have already mentioned that he possessed the gift of tears, when such phenomenon was timely, and besides all these things, he owned some extensive salt-marshes on a bay. These were too wet for private persons to buy, but he was going to be happy to sell them to the government for a naval station when he should be Senator, after his present office had expired. Meanwhile he went about busily with his basket, collecting popularity from the humblest dumping lot. If there was one kind of audience that the Secretary liked above all others, it was an audience of fresh, bright, brave, young recruits. He missed no chance to tell them so. Their earnest faces, he was apt to say if there was a flag anywhere in sight, stirred his heart more, much more than the stars upon Old Glory waving yonder. Then he would point to Old Glory, and get results from the gallery as satisfactory as any actor could wish. Indeed, the Secretary could have made the drama as lucrative as he made politics. He could tell a story and make you laugh, tell another and make you cry, and a really excellent second-rate actor was lost in him. In the good old days of which I write, many of our political patriots resembled the Secretary. Recruits after his own heart sat close before him one afternoon at McPherson, gathered from various Southern States. “Let those young men come up front!” he had commanded from the platform in his deepest frock-coat basso. “Let them see me and let me see them. We understand each other, for we are comrades.”