At the time first mentioned, Mr. Blaine was in excellent health, buoyant in spirits, aggressive to the last degree, and full of hope as to the future. The disappointments and bereavements that saddened the closing years of his life had as yet cast no shadow upon his pathway. Next in leadership to Mr. Blaine, upon the Republican side, was the Hon. James A. Garfield. He possessed few of the qualities of brilliant leadership so eminently characteristic of Blaine, but was withal one of the ablest men I have ever known. Gifted with rare powers of oratory, with an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of information at his command, he knew no superior in debate. At one period of his life he was the recipient of public honors without a parallel in our history. While yet a Representative in Congress, he was a Senator-elect from Ohio, and the President-elect of the United States. For once, it indeed seemed that "fortune had come with both hands full." In the words of the Persian poet, "he had obtained an ear of corn from every harvest." And yet, a few months later, in the words of his great eulogist, "the stately mansion of power had become to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness." My personal acquaintance with Mr. Garfield began early in January, 1876, when we were members of the House Committee appointed by the Speaker to convey the remains of a deceased member to his late home, Norwich, Connecticut, for burial. Another member of the Committee was Representative Wheeler of New York. It was late Saturday afternoon when we were conveyed by carriages from the crossing at Jersey City to the depot where the Norwich train was in waiting. Our route lay for some distance along Broadway, through the very heart of the great metropolis. As we passed the hurrying throngs that crowded the great thoroughfare that sombre winter evening, Mr. Garfield remarked that it was a scene similar to the one we were then witnessing that suggested to Mr. Bryant one of the most stirring of his shorter poems. At our request and in tones that linger even yet in my memory, he then repeated these lines: "Let me move slowly through the street Filled with an ever shifting train, Amid the sound of steps that beat The murmuring walks like autumn rain. How fast the flitting figures come, The mild, the fierce, the stony face; Some bright with thoughtless smiles, and some Where secret tears have left their trace! They pass to toil, to strife, to rest, To halls in which the feast is spread, To chambers where the funeral guest In silence sits beside the dead. Each where his tasks or pleasures call They pass, and heed each other not. There is Who heeds, Who holds them all In His large love, and boundless thought.