She stood by him, married him. They had nineteen years of each other. He was sixty-one when she died in his arms. He lived to be sixty-eight.
He never could clear his name of the scandal, though he took it to court. They failed to show he was guilty, but he couldn't prove that he wasn't. So he never was premier, and he never again sat in the cabinet.
His friends said his whole career showed that the scandal was false. They stood by him strongly. But the People, whom he would have served with such courage, did not.
Story of a Farmer
There once was a tall husky fellow, big hands and feet; not much education. (Though he came of a fairly good family.) He had very bad teeth. His father had left him a farm, and that was his great interest—farming. He had the kind of feeling about farming that a good shoemaker has about shoes. Of course, he complained more or less, and felt dissatisfied and discouraged, and threatened to give up his farm when things went badly. But there was nothing else he could have willingly turned to; and he was never weary of experimenting with different ways of planting his crops.
He was a sound-thinking man, and men trusted him. He grew prominent. Held some offices. As a result, when he was forty-three he had to go away from home for some years. This was while he was managing an army. And I ought to explain that it was a hard army to manage. It was not only badly equipped and poorly trained, but sometimes the men would run away in the midst of a battle. That made this man angry. He was ordinarily composed and benign in his manner, but when he saw the soldiers showing fear he used to become violently aroused, and would swear at them and strike them. His nature loathed cowardice. He cared nothing for danger himself, perhaps because of his teeth, and he couldn't understand why these other men dreaded to die.
All his life, when he was at table with others, he used to sit there in silence, drumming on the cloth with his fork. He seldom joked. He was hardly ever playful. People said he was too dignified, too solemn. Well! one isn't apt to be a comedian, precisely, with toothache. He was only twenty-two when he began having his teeth pulled, they tortured him so; and he kept on losing them, painfully, year after year.
About this army again. He didn't want to manage it. He had had quite a liking for military work, as a youth, and had even gone on a small expedition to see active service, though his mother had interfered all she could, and tried hard to prevent him. But as this was all the experience he ever had had, and as he had never studied warfare, he didn't know anything about handling large bodies of troops.
However, he had a clear mind and a good natural insight; and in spite of his ignorance, of which he was painfully conscious, he managed to win the war, and then thankfully returned to his farm. He went back with enthusiasm. He had been away for eight years altogether, and for six of those years he did not once set foot on his fields. He had found time, however, in between whiles, to talk with the farmers in the northerly parts of his country, and collect new ideas. He now began to experiment with plaster of Paris and powdered stone as fertilizers. He tried clover, rye, peas, oats and carrots to strengthen his land. He tried mud. He planted potatoes with manure, and potatoes without, and noted exactly what the difference was in the yield. His diary speaks of the chinch bugs attacking his corn, and of the mean way the rain had of passing by on the other side of the river, falling generously there, while "not enough fell here to wet a handkerchief." He laboriously calculated the number of seed in a pound (this retired Commander!) and found that red clover had 71,000, timothy 298,000 and barley 8,925.