Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/68

 I reached the station that morning, Mr. Blaine was already there, walking up and down the platform arm in arm with his son Emmons. He was a gray man, dressed in gray clothes, with spats made of the cloth of his habit, and there was about him an air of vague sadness, which in his high countenance became almost a pain, though just then, in the companionship of the son he loved, there was, for a little while, the expression of a mild happiness, maybe a solace. His face was of a grayish, almost luminous pallor, and his silver hair and beard were in the same key. William Walter Phelps, then our minister to Germany, was traveling with him, and on our way down to South Bend the constant entrance of plain citizens from the other coaches into our car filled Mr. Phelps with a kind of wonder. Commercial travelers, farmers, all sorts and conditions of men, entered and introduced themselves to Mr. Blaine, and he sat and talked with them all in that simplicity which marks the manners, even if it has departed the spirit of the republic.

"It is a remarkable sight you are witnessing," said Mr. Phelps to us reporters, "a sight you could witness in no other country in the world. There is the premier of a great government, and yet the commonest man may approach him without ceremony, and talk to him as though he were nobody."

Fresh from his life at a foreign court, he was viewing events from that foreign point of view, perhaps thinking just then in European sequences, and since there was such simplicity, it was not hard for any of us to have conversation with our premier.