The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield: Twentieth President of the United States, Including Full and Accurate Details of His Eventful Administration, Assassination, Last Hours, Death, Etc., Together with Notable Extracts from His Speeches and LettersBrown, E. E. (Emma Elizabeth)
History
The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield: Twentieth President of the United States, Including Full and Accurate Details of His Eventful Administration, Assassination, Last Hours, Death, Etc., Together with Notable Extracts from His Speeches and Letters
Brown, E. E. (Emma Elizabeth)
Garfield, James A. (James Abram), 1831-1881; Presidents -- United States -- Biography
Not long after, without anybody being able to say
how the news spread, the fleet at anchor outside the harbor one by one
ran up their ensigns, hauled them half down, and there made them fast
for the day.
"Amid the innumerable demonstrations of sorrow to be seen and heard
these last two days all over England, I know of none which more truly
indicates the essentially popular character of the regret which the
President's death has excited.... An English friend who was shooting ten
days ago over a Yorkshire moor told me that, as the scattered line of
sportsmen were pushing through the heather in silence, the gamekeeper
met him some yards away, turned and asked: 'Can you tell me, sir, how
President Garfield is?' There on that lonely hillside, three thousand
miles and more distant from the sufferer, in the early morning, beneath
a sun which was not yet shining upon the President, breathing an air he
never breathed, this Yorkshire peasant, who had spent his life without
so much as hearing the President's name till a few weeks before; who
knew not the letters of which it was formed; who knew about grouse and
guns and dogs and the weather, and nothing else whatever; whose interest
in life never went beyond the stone hut in which he slept and ate, and
the stretch of furz-clad upland which lifted itself against the western
sky,--he, like the fishermen, had come to think or to feel that, somehow
or other, the life or death of that far-away martyr concerned him too.
It is easy to say that beneath the shooting-jacket and the jersey beats
the same human heart. No doubt it does. But what was it that set it
beating in unison with so many millions of others like it with sympathy
for the President? Lord Palmerston said he never knew what fame was till
he heard of the Tartar mothers on the steppes of Russia in Asia
frightening their children into quiet with some queer travesty of his
dreaded name. Yorkshire is not so remote as Russian Asia, indeed, but
the friendly concern of the gamekeeper was surely a truer measure of
real fame than the ignorant terror of the Muscovite mother. I know I
thought when I heard it that the President who lay dying would have
valued such a proof of the universality of the interest in him not less
than those expressions of it--certainly not less genuine--which came
from much higher quarters."
[Illustration: Francklyn Cottage, where the President died.]
Said another writer:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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