The mental torture of the last three or four years of his life I must touch upon again. The most active anti-slavery partisan and most scarred soldier of the union will compassionate if he but contemplate. I met him only now and then. As I read his feelings--one eye quenched by cataract and the other failing fast; his contemporaries of the bar and political arena dead; the wife whom he loved better than he did himself sinking under a disease gradually destroying her mind; ever harrowed with the thought that his country was no more, and that he was a foreigner and exile in the spot which he had always called home,--though I was full of increasing joy over the benefit of emancipation to my people and gladness at the promise of reunited America, my tranquillity would take flight whenever he came into my mind. He was that spectacle of a good man in a hopeless struggle against fate that moves enemies to pity. To me his last state was more tragic and pathetic than that of Oedipus. Of course his powers were declining. I know that he would never have drank too much if there had been no sectional agitation, secession, war, nor reconstruction. His appetite was never that insane thirst, as I have heard him call it, which impels one into delirium tremens. He always disappointed his adversaries at the bar calculating that drink would disable him at an important part of the conduct. Others as well as myself can testify to this. Near the end he deliberately chose to drain full cups of purpose to sweeten bitter memories. With moderation he had more assurance of longevity than any other of his generation; and he would, I verily believe, have been green and flourishing in his hundredth year. He lost his rare faculty of managing money. It was a shock of surprise to me when the fire in August, 1883, disclosed that he had let the insurance of his interest in the Kimball house run out shortly before. It was a pitiable sight to see him in his growing blindness and wasting frame armed by his negro servant along the streets of Atlanta in his last visits to the place. During all this time he was dying by inches.