On a dais, raised above all, sits the Vice-President. I have seen six men preside over the Senate. Hamlin, slow, solid, immobile, and good-natured. Foote, silver-haired, silver-toned, the king of parliamentarians. Foster of Connecticut, that most gentle gentleman, who went from the Senate bearing the good will of every Senator whatever his politics. Wade, the most positive power of all, with his high, steep head, shaggy eyebrows, beetling perceptive brow, half roofing the melancholy eyes, the rough-hewn nose, the dogged mouth, and broad immovable chin. Life lines our faces according to its will and gazing on the furrows of this one, one reads the story of the whole battle. Looking, there was no need that its owner should tell what a warfare life had been since the poor farmer-boy, more than half a century ago, turned his face from the Connecticut Valley and striving with the earth beneath his feet dug his way (on the Erie Canal) toward the West to fortune, and to an honorable fame. Then came Schuyler Colfax, who brought into the silent and stately Senate the habits of the bustling noisy house. It was a hard seat for “Schuyler,” that Vice-President’s chair, and he came at last to vacate it regularly by two o’clock that he might write in the seclusion of the Vice-President’s room a few of those ten thousand popular personal letters which made his chief lever of influence with the people and which he always used to write in the Speaker’s chair. As President of the Senate he was usually just, always urbane, never impressive. He had not the presence which filled the seat to the sight, nor the dignity which commanded attention, and silence. Under his ruling the Senate changed its character perceptibly from a grave august body to a buzzing and inattentive one. As the President of the Senate seldom listened to a speaker, the Senators as rarely took the trouble to listen to each other. The question discussed might be of the gravest import to the whole nation, the speaker’s words, to himself, might be of the most tremendous importance to the national weal, just the same he had to empty them upon vacancy, speaking to nothing in particular, while the Vice-President looked another way, and his colleagues went on scribbling letters, whispering political secrets to each other, munching apples in the aisles or smoking in the open cloak-rooms, with feet aloft.