The express wagon which was to convey the President to the depot, was in waiting at the front entrance to the Executive Mansion all night. It was a new vehicle, and the springs being well oiled, could not impart much jarring to the bed on which the President would lie.
When the track was being laid through Elberon, on which he was to be taken to the Francklyn cottage as a last hope, the surveyor apologized to a lady whose garden it laid waste.
"Your flowers have required the labor of many summers, madam, and we shall ruin them," he said.
"O sir!" she cried, "I am willing you should ruin my house—all I have, if it would help to save him!"
There was to be a double departure from the White House. The President's sons, Harry and James, were to start for Williams College, and shortly before ten o'clock on the evening of the fifth, they bade their father good-by, and took leave of their mother who was hopeful and courageous, believing the journey to Long Branch would save her husband's life. Their countenances were grave, and the passers-by, as they respectfully made way for them, could not but feel that the two young men were just about to start upon a career as, possibly, their distinguished father was about to end one.
Private Secretary Brown gives the following account of the trip to Long Branch: "Upon leaving the Executive Mansion the President appeared to enjoy the scenery and looked around inquiringly. All the way from the White House to the depot the President was very anxious to observe everything, and in this he was not prevented. He experienced little or no disturbance in being transferred from the vehicle to the car, and his pulse, although slightly accelerated, reaching about 115, fell to about 106 before the train started, and shortly afterward fell to 104 and again to 102. The first stop of the train was made at Patapsco, at which point the parotid gland was dressed. At half-past nine o'clock the President's pulse was 108 and of good character. At that hour three ounces of beef extract were administered. Between Philadelphia and Monmouth Junction, the special train made several miles at the rate of seventy miles per hour. Bay View, this side of Baltimore, was reached at 8.05, and a brief stop was made to enable the surgeons to make the morning dressing of the wound. The wound was found to have suffered no derangement by the travel. The dressing was soon accomplished, and the train, after leaving Bay View, was run at the rate of about fifty miles per hour. The track in this locality is very straight, and in excellent condition, and though the speed was at times greater than fifty miles per hour, the vibration of the President's bed, it is said, was no more than had the train been moving twenty-five miles per hour. The attending surgeons feel very much gratified with the manner in which the removal was conducted, and are generally of the opinion that, with the exception of being slightly fatigued, the President bore the journey exceedingly well."
"This is a great journey, Crete," he said to his wife, as the train rushed on at lightning speed. "Let her go! The faster the better," he added, when the doctors expressed their fears that the rapid motion of the engine would tire him.
"Don't put down the curtain! I want to see the people! Let them look in!" he exclaimed, as he caught a glimpse of the eager, anxious crowds at the different stations.
One of the Boston dailies wrote as follows—
"In the preparations for the trip the great popular solicitude for the well-being of the President infected even soulless railroad corporations, as they are sometimes called, so that the management of the lines over which he had to pass could not do too much to reduce the fatigue or other injurious effect of the jaunt. It is a credit to our common humanity, that everybody in any way connected with this transfer of the President, from the mechanic to the railroad director, required no spur but his own feelings to exert himself to the utmost for the safety and comfort of him who had suffered so terribly, and evinced such grand qualities under the most adverse circumstances. No railroad train was ever the burden of so much anxious, prayerful solicitation as that conveying the President to his destination. To change and apply one of General Garfield's own expressions, the great heart of the nation must have nobly sustained the presidential patient as he sped on his way to a locality where, it is hoped, the recuperating processes of nature will place him on the high road to convalescence.