Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/53

 he saw it, wherever it led him. But his active days were not many after that; ere long he was kicked by one of his horses, a vicious animal, half bronco, which he insisted on riding, and he was invalided for the rest of his days. He spent them in a wheel-*chair, pushed about by a negro boy. It was a cross he bore bravely enough, without complaint, spending his hours in reading of politics, now that he could no longer participate in them, and more and more in reading verse, and even in committing it to memory, so that to the surprise of his family he soon replaced the grace he had always said at table with some recited stanza of poetry, and he took to cultivating, or to sitting in his chair while there was cultivated, under his direction, a little rose garden. He knew all those roses as though they were living persons: when a lady called,—if the roses were in bloom,—he would say to his colored house-boy:

"Go cut off Madame Maintenon, and bring her here."

Then he would present Madame Maintenon to the caller with such a bow as he could make in his chair, and an apology for not rising. He was patient and brave, yet he did not like to feel the scepter passing from him, and he resented what he considered interferences with his liberties. One day when he had returned from a visit to an old friend, to whose home his colored boy had wheeled him, one of his daughters asked, in a somewhat exaggerated tone of propitiation:

"Well, Father, how did you find Mr. Hovey?"

"I found him master of his own house!" he blazed.