I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my past behavior as I am of that piece of it.  He walked up to the water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and then went wearily within doors.  The whole affair, so simple, has always remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.

V.

I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of that kind I carried on the duplicate myself.  It was on my second visit that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O’Connor, at the house of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk.  He was one of the promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I believe he wrote poems too.  He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt Whitman’s champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare, then newly exploited by the poor lady of Bacon’s name, who died constant to it in an insane asylum.  He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as “the fat peasant of Stratford,” and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a measure that consoled, if it did not convince.  The great war was then full upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awful breath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gathered round the first fires of autumn, O’Connor would lift his beautiful head with a fine effect of prophecy, and say, “Friends, I feel a sense of victory in the air.”  He was not wrong; only the victory was for the other aide.

Who beside O’Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell now; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending litterateurs, since more or less extinct.  I make certain only of the young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of ’Leaves of Grass’, and then failed promptly if not consequently.  But I had already met, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know.  Mr. Stedman and I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can be surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at a friend’s house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness, and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into the joyful realms of hope and praise.  In him I found the quality of Boston, the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere pose of the literary life; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to his ideal of it.  His earthly mission then was to write letters from Washington for the New York World, which started in