Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/33

 celebrated by the chairman and cheered by the delegates they were assiduously given seats in large chairs, and there, throughout the session, side by side they sat, their hands clasped over the crooks of their heavy canes, their white old heads unsteady, peering out in a certain purblind, bewildered, aged way over that mighty assembly of the power and the wealth, the respectability and the authority, of the nation—far other than that revolutionary gathering they had attended half a century before!

All through the session, now and then, I would look at them; there was a certain indefinable pathos in them, they sat so still, they were so old, there was in their attitude the acquiescence of age—and I would recall my grandfather's stories of the days when they were the force in the Republic, and the runaway "niggers," and the rifles, and the great blazing up of liberty in the land, and it seemed to me that Time, or what Thomas Hardy calls the Ironic Spirit, or perhaps it was only the politicians who were managing the convention, had played some grotesque, stupendous joke on those patriarchs. Did their old eyes, gazing so strangely on that scene, behold its implications? Did they descry the guide-*post that told them how far away they really were from that first convention and its ideals?

But whatever the reflections of those two aboriginal Republicans, or whatever emotions or speculations they may have inspired in those who saw them,—the torch of liberty being ever brandished somewhere in this world and tossed from hand to hand,—they had done their part in their day, and might