The Last Leaf | Page 6

his works, but I do better here to pick up only the straws, not
meddling with the heavy-garnered wheat. I recall an inconspicuous
figure, of ordinary stature, and a face whose marked feature was the
large nose (Emerson called it "corvine"), but that, as some one has said,
is the hook which nature makes salient in the case of men whom
fortune is to drag forward into leadership. He spoke in the pulpit of my
grandfather, who at the time had been for nearly sixty years minister of
the old Pilgrim parish. From that coign of vantage, my faithful
grandsire had no doubt smoked out many a sinner, and had not been
sparing of the due polemic fulminations in times of controversy. The
old theology, too, had undergone at his hands faithful fumigation to
make it sanitary for the modern generations. From one kind of smoke,
however, that venerable pulpit had been free until the hour of Seward's
arrival. It arched my eyebrows well when I saw him at the end of his
address light a cigar in the very shrine, a burnt-offering, in my good
grandfather's eyes certainly, more fitting for altars satanic. My
grandfather promptly called him down, great man though he was, a rub
which the statesman received from the white-haired minister,
good-naturedly postponing his smoke. But Seward rode rough-shod too
often over conventions, and sometimes over real proprieties. In an
over-convivial frame once, his tongue, loosened by champagne, nearly
wagged us into international complications, and there is a war-time
anecdote, which I have never seen in print and I believe is unhackneyed,
which casts a light. A general of the army, talking with Lincoln and the
Cabinet, did not spare his oaths. "What church do you attend?"
interposed the President at last, stroking his chin in his innocent way.
Confused at an inquiry so foreign to the topic under discussion, the
soldier replied he did not attend much of any church himself, but his
folks were Methodists. "How odd!" said. Lincoln, "I thought you were

an Episcopalian. You swear just like Seward, and Seward is an
Episcopalian."
But I should be sorry to believe there was any trouble with Seward but
a surface blemish. Though in '61 he advocated a foreign war as a means
for bringing together North and South, and desired to shelve practically
Lincoln while he himself stood at the front to manage the turmoil, he
made no more mistakes than statesmen in general. He had been
powerful for good before the war, and during its course, with what
virile stiffness of the upper lip did he face and foil the frowning foreign
world! He had the insight and candour to do full justice at last to
Lincoln, whom at first he depreciated. Then the purchase of Alaska!
Writing as I do on the western coast I am perhaps affected by the
glamour of that marvellous land. When news of the bargain came in the
seventies, the scorners sang:
"Hear it all ye polar bears, Waltz around the pole in pairs. All ye
icebergs make salaam, You belong to Uncle Sam. Lo, upon the snow
too plain Falls his dark tobacco stain."
We thought that very funny and very apt,--but now! I am glad I have
his image vivid, in the pulpit beside my grandfather scratching a match
for a too careless cigar. Between smokes he had done, and was still to
do, some fine things.
* * * * *
In those days, Edward Everett and Robert C. Winthrop were often
under my immature gaze. Men much alike in views, endowments, and
accomplishments, they had played out their parts in public life and had
been consigned to their Boston shelf. In the perspective they are
statuettes rather than statues, of Parian spotlessness, ribboned and
gilt-edged through an elegant culture, well appointed according to the
best taste, companion Sévres pieces, highly ornamental, and effectually
shelved. By the side of the robust protagonists of those stormy years
they stand as figurines, not figures, and yet it was rather through their
fate than through their fault perhaps that they are what they are in our
Pantheon. They were not at all without virile quality. Everett bore

himself well in some rough Senatorial debates, and Winthrop, as
Speaker of the House at Washington, was in stormy times an able and
respected officer. But coarse contacts jarred upon their refinement; and
when, like the public men in general who saw in postponement of the
slavery agitation the wiser course, they were retired from the front, it is
easy to see why the world judged them as it did. Everett's son, Mr.
Sidney Everett, at one time Assistant Secretary of State, was my
classmate, and honoured me once with a request to edit his father's
works. I declined the task,