Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/81

 he were alone, sing a few staves of old songs, like "Darling Nelly Gray," and "Rosie Lee, Courting Down in Tennessee," and some of the old tunes he had learned in Kentucky as a boy. He liked poetry, if it were not of the introspective modern mood, and while I have heard of such extraordinary characters, I never believed the stories of their endurance, until I was able to discover in him one man who actually did read Sir Walter Scott's novels through every year. For the most part he had some member of his family read them to him, and he found in them the naïve pleasure of a child. I used to think I would remember the things he was always saying, and the stories he was always telling about Lincoln or Douglas or Grant, but I never could keep note-books and the more imposing sayings have departed. Yet there flashes before the memory with the detail of a cinematograph that scene of a winter's evening when I entered the big living-room in his home and there found him with his wife before the great open fire. She was reading aloud to him from "Ivanhoe."

"Come in, Mr. Brand," he always addressed me by prefixing "Mr." to my Christian name. "Come in," he called in his hearty voice. "We are just storming a castle."

He lived on to the century's end, with a sort of gusto in life that never failed, I think, until that day when he attended the funeral of the last of his old contemporaries, General John M. McClernand, that fierce old warrior who had quarreled with Grant and lived on in Springfield until he could fight no more with anyone. Senator Palmer came home from