Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/189

 Or again I see him, superintending the tearing up of street railway tracks, on streets where the franchises of the private company had expired, to make room for the rails of the city company, calmly smoking a cigar, and with a gesture of his expressive delicate white hand waving aside the latest of the many injunctions that were sued out against him. The battle was never lost to him, though his followers were often discouraged. He might have said of court injunctions as Napoleon said of bullets at the battle of Krasnoi:

"Bah! They have been whistling about our legs these forty years!"

But I see him best I think in the great hall of his home in Euclid avenue, one short, fat leg tucked comfortably under him, his cigar in his aristocratic hand, his friends and admirers about him. It was a remarkable coterie of brilliant young men. One of them had been originally an opponent, one of those who heckled him in the tent, a fiery young radical not long since a blacklisted mechanic who had gone hungry when on strike, Peter Witt, one of the most picturesque personalities in Ohio politics; he became one of Johnson's intimate friends and strongest supporters, and a splendid speaker on the stump. He was city clerk of Cleveland under all the Johnson administrations and is now the street railway commissioner of that city under Mayor Newton D. Baker, who, as city solicitor, was another of the group of those happy days. Mr. Baker was like a boy in appearance, with his sensitive face and the ideals of a poet, and a brilliant lawyer. He carried