“Shall you see Judge Weeden at the office? Yes? Will you have the kindness to give him this—yes? If it’s no trouble to you, of course.”
Gillespie, J., was not over-careful of the feelings of lawyers’ clerks, as a rule; but he had that decent disinclination to act ultra præscriptum which marks the attitude of the well-bred man toward his inferiors in office. He knew that he had no business to use Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather’s clerk as a messenger in his private correspondence.
Horace understood him, took the letter, and allowed himself a quiet smile when he reached the crowded corridor.
What mattered, he thought, as his brisk feet clattered down the wide stairs of the rotunda, the petty insolence of office now? He was Gillespie’s messenger to-day; but had not his young powers already received recognition from a greater than Gillespie? If Judge Gillespie lived long enough he should put his gouty old legs under Judge Walpole’s mahogany, and prose over his port—yes, he should have port, like the relic of mellow old days that he was—of the times “when your father-in-law and I, Walpole, were boys together.”
Ah, there you have the spell of the Red Silk Handkerchief!
It was a wonderful tale to Horace; for he saw it in that wonderful light which shall shine on no man of us more than once in his life—on some of us not at all, Heaven help us!—but, in the telling, it is a simple tale:
“The Golden-Mouthed Orator of St. Lawrence” was at the height of his fame in that period of storm and stress which had the civil war for its climax. His misfortune was to be drawn into a contest for which he was not equipped, and in which he had little interest. His sphere of action was far from the battle-ground of the day. The intense localism that bounded his knowledge and his sympathies had but one break—he had tasted in his youth the extravagant hospitality of the South, and he held it in grateful remembrance. So it happened that he was a trimmer,—a moderationist he called himself,—a man who dealt in optimistic generalities, and who thought that if everybody—the slaves included—would only act temperately and reasonably, and view the matter from the standpoint of pure policy, the differences of South and North could be settled as easily as, through his own wise intervention, the old turnip-field feud of Farmer Oliver and Farmer Bunker had been wiped out of existence.
His admirers agreed with him, and they sent him to Congress to fill the unexpired short term of their representative, who had just died in Washington of what we now know as a malarial fever. It was not to be expected, perhaps, that the Honorable Mr. Walpole would succeed in putting a new face on the great political question in the course of his first term; but they all felt sure that his first speech would startle men who had never heard better than what Daniel Webster had had to offer them.
But the gods were against the Honorable Mr. Walpole. On the day set for his great effort there was what the theatrical people call a counter-attraction. Majah Pike had come up from Mizourah, sah, to cane that demn’d Yankee hound, Chahles Sumnah, sah,—yes, sah, to thrash him like a dawg, begad! And all Washington had turned out to see the performance, which was set down for a certain hour, in front of Mr. Sumner’s door.
There was just a quorum when the golden-mouthed member began his great speech,—an inattentive, chattering crowd, that paid no attention to his rolling rhetoric and rococo grandiloquence. He told the empty seats what a great country this was, and how beautiful was a middle policy, and he illustrated this with a quotation from Homer, in the original Greek (a neat novelty: Latin was fashionable for parliamentary use in Webster’s time), with, for the benefit of the uneducated, the well-known translation by the great Alexander Pope, commencing: