Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/74

 *fore a new Congress would convene, so that the millennium was postponed a good three years at least.

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However, there were other interests and other delights with which to occupy one's self meanwhile, not the least of which was Mr. Butterworth himself. He was then out of Congress and in Chicago as Solicitor General of the World's Columbian Exposition, for which Chicago was preparing. For a while I was relieved from writing about politics, and assigned to the World's Fair, and there were so many distinguished men from all over the nation associated in that enterprise that it was very much like politics in its superficial aspects. There was, for instance, the World's Columbian Commission, a body created under the authority of Congress, composed of two commissioners from each state, appointed by its governor, and that body exactly the size of the senate was like it in personnel and character. The witty Thomas E. Palmer of Michigan was its president, and there were among its membership such men as Judge Lindsay, later senator from Kentucky, Judge Harris of Virginia, who looked like George Washington, and many other delightful and pungent characters. But no personality among them all was more interesting than Colonel James A. McKenzie, Judge Lindsay's colleague from Kentucky. He was tall and spare of frame, and his long moustache and goatee, and the great black slouch hat he wore