Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/382

 a vision of my uncle as walking that afternoon in other groves with all these dark ministerial figures that towered over my boyhood. They were all Puritans, too, strong and rugged men, inflexible, obdurate, much enduring, stern pioneers whose like is known no more. And I, who could join in the lofty strains of that old hymn, as a memorial to my uncle, could find unavailing regret in my reverence But all changes, and it was a time of change, one of those periods which make up the whelming tragedy of this life. And, as they had gone, so all the old combinations had disappeared with them, resolved into the elements that make up that shadowy vale we call the past But we were driving on, racing away from that past as fast as we could go, on by the cemetery where my uncle lies in his grave, on by the rocky ledges of the Olentangy, the little stream where we boys used to swim, and, just as darkness was falling, besmattered with mud, we drove into Columbus, and along High Street, hideous in the crazy decorations that were hung out in honor of the State Fair, and up to the Neil House—and across the street on the steps of the old state house four or five thousand people already gathered for the meeting at which I was to be the only speaker. A bath and a bite of supper, and then across the street to the meeting, and I was standing there before that vast crowd, and over us the shadowy mass of the old capitol, in which my grandfather had made the first motion that was ever put in it as a member of the senate half a century before; he told me that