Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 -- Childhood and youth
out of him, the habit of his lifetime, that never came back again: the
sense of the sacredness of life, and the impossibility of destroying it.
He let a silence follow on his solemn words, and in the leading of his
confession he went on to say how the sense of the sacredness of other
things of peace had gone out of some of the soldiers and never come back
again. What was not their own could be made their own by the act of
taking it; and he said we would all be surprised to know how often the
property of others had been treated after the war as if it were the
property of public enemies by the simple-hearted fellows who had carried
the use of war in the enemy's country back into their own. "You would be
surprised," he ended, "to know how many of those old soldiers, who
fought bravely and lived according to the traditions of military
necessity, are now in the penitentiary for horse-stealing."
Once again I memorably met Garfield in my father's house in Ashtabula
County (the strong heart of his most Republican Congressional district)
where he had come to see me about some passages in Lamon's _Life of
Lincoln_, which was then in the hands of my Boston publishers, withheld
in their doubt of the wisdom or propriety of including them. I think
Garfield was then somewhat tempted by the dramatic effect these passages
would have with the public, but he was not strenuous about it, and he
yielded whatever authority he might have had in the matter to the
misgiving of the publishers; in fact, I do not believe that if it had
been left to him altogether he would have advised their appearance. I
met him for the last time in 1879 (when my wife and I were for a week
the guests of President Hayes), as he was coming, with Mrs. Garfield on
his arm, from calling upon us at the White House. He stopped me and
said, "I was thinking how much like your father you carried yourself,"
and I knew that he spoke from the affection which had been many years
between them. I was yet too young to feel the resemblance, but how often
in my later years I have felt and seen it! As we draw nearer to the door
between this world and the next it is as if those who went before us
returned to us out of it to claim us part of them.
VIII
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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