over it.  These were some of the things that reconciled that good man to sudden death.  He frequently wanted to set up a mark and swear at it, but his principles would not permit him.  He never let the sun go down upon his wrath, but he, no doubt, often wished that he was in that region near the pole where the sun does not go down for six months at a time, and gives wrath a fair chance to materialize.  He was a thoughtful man.  He spent his days inventing snow-ploughs and his evenings in sipping hot rum and ruminating upon the probable strength of the future Prohibition vote.  Those were times when the wives remonstrated with their husbands regarding the unfortunate and disappointing results of too much drink, particularly when it led the men to go out and shoot at Indians—­and miss them. [Long continued laughter.] It is supposed that these men, like many others, generally began drinking on account of the bite of a snake, and usually had to quit on account of attacks from the same reptiles.

But, Mr. President, if you will allow me a few words of becoming gravity with which to retract any aspersions which I may have inadvertently cast upon the sacred person of the ancient Puritan, I assure you I will use those words with a due sense of the truth of the epigram—­that “gravity is a stratagem invented to conceal the poverty of the mind.”  That rugged old Puritan, firm of purpose and stout of heart, had been fittingly trained by his life in the Old World, for the conspicuous part he was to enact in the New.  He was acquainted with hardships, inured to trials, practised in self-abnegation.  He had reformed religions, revolutionized society, and shaken the thrones of tyrants.  He had learned that tyranny you may have anywhere—­it is a weed which grows on any soil—­but if you want freedom you must go forth and fight for it. [Long continued applause.]

At his very birth he had had breathed into his nostrils the breath of that true liberty which can turn blind submission into rational obedience, which, as Hall says, can “smother the voice of kings, dissipate the mists of superstition, and by its magic touch kindle the rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, the flames of eloquence.” [Applause.] He had the courage of his convictions, he counselled not with his fears.  He neither looked to the past with regret nor to the future with apprehension.  He might have been a zealot—­he was never a hypocrite; he might have been eccentric—­he was never ridiculous.  He was a Hercules rather than an Adonis.  In his warfare he fired hot shot; he did not send in flags of truce; he led forlorn hopes; he did not follow in the wake of charges.  When he went forth with his sledge-hammer logic and his saw-mill philosophy, all who stood in the path of his righteous wrath went down before him, with nothing by which to recognize them except the pieces he had left of them.  When he crossed the seas to plant his banners in the West, when he disembarked upon the bleak shores of America, the land which was