I saw and talked with Brown perhaps half a dozen times at Chicago during his journeys to and from Kansas. He impressed me then as a religious zealot of the Old Testament type, believing in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures and in himself as a competent interpreter thereof. But the text "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay," never engaged his attention. He was oppressed with no doubts about anything, least of all about his own mission in the world. His mission was to bring slavery to an end, but that was a subject that he did not talk about. He was a man of few words, and was extremely reticent about his plans, even those of ordinary movements in daily life. He had a square jaw, clean-shaven, and an air of calmness and self-confidence, which attracted weaker intellects and gave him mastery over them. He had steel-gray eyes, and steel-gray hair, close-cropped, that stood stiff on his head like wool cards, giving him an aspect of invincibleness. When he applied to the National Kansas Committee for the arms in their possession after the Kansas war was ended, he was asked by Mr. H. B. Hurd, the secretary, what use he intended to make of them. He refused to answer, and his request was accordingly denied. The arms were voted back to the Massachusetts men who had contributed them originally. Brown obtained an order for them from the owners. The Thirty-sixth Congress met on the 5th of December, 1859. The first business introduced in the Senate was a resolution from Mason, of Virginia, calling for the appointment of a committee to inquire into the facts attending John Brown's invasion and seizure of the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Trumbull offered an amendment proposing that a similar inquiry be made in regard to the seizure in December, 1855, of the United States Arsenal at Liberty, Missouri, and the pillage thereof by a band of Missourians, who were marching to capture and control the ballot-boxes in Kansas. On the following day Trumbull made a brief speech in support of his amendment, in the course of which he commented on the Harper's Ferry affair in words which have never faded from the memory of the present writer. Nobody during the intervening half-century has summed up the moral and legal aspects of the John Brown raid more truly or more forcibly. He said: