“At another time the senator and one of his Democratic congressional associates had been out to address a mass meeting and the congressman spoke first and used almost an hour of the hour and a half allotted to the two. When they returned to the hotel several gentlemen who had accompanied them gathered about them and one said, ‘Congressman, better have a chair, you have made a very vigorous speech and are doubtless tired.’ ‘No, thank you,’ replied the congressman, ‘I do not care to sit down.’ ‘I noticed that when you were speaking,’ was Kern’s pat and mirth-provoking injection. “Two middle-aged Indiana congressmen always occupied connecting bachelor apartments when their families were not with them, and one was telling the senator how the other seemed to be growing old and childish. ‘Why, he sleeps with his watch under his pillow,’ the solon said, ‘to help him wake up in the morning and when I go in and call to him and tell him it is time to look at his watch he rears up like a wild horse and acts like one.’ ‘Probably frightened, in his half-awake condition,’ said the senator, ‘with apprehension that you are some constituent about to ask him a direct question as to where he stands on free garden seed.’ “But the real milk of human kindness in Senator Kern’s life was not touchingly revealed in his tireless devotion to the needy--to the underdog in the struggle for existence--and his patience with these was none the less marked than with the most influential in the country. And therefore what little social life he enjoyed was constantly invaded by innumerable callers with a mission of self help, to be relieved by the senator, and he would leave the social circle, leave his dinner table, and leave the helpful comfort of his bed when in ill health to see them, not only once, but again and again.