(Signed) The Queen."
To Minister Lowell the Queen telegraphed as follows:—
"With deep grief I and my children learn the sad but not unexpected news of the fatal termination of the sufferings of the President. His loss is a great misfortune. I have learned with deep sorrow that the President has passed away."
Smalley, the correspondent of the New York Tribune writing from London said,—
"It was about four o'clock in the morning of Tuesday, by English time, that President Garfield died. An hour later the news was here, and some of the morning papers published it in a few late copies of their morning edition. It was known in the provinces at the same moment, and published in the same way. Before I say anything about the feeling it evoked in high places and with the general public, I should like to mention what occurred in the town where I was staying; Whitby, a fishing town and small seaport which is also a watering-place on the northeast coast of Yorkshire. At this season Whitby is the rendezvous for herring-fishers, and its little harbor is crowded with boats hailing from ports all the way from Pentland Firth to Penzance; Penzance itself sending a large contingent. The fishermen are a simple folk, leading a hard life, untaught, and as free from any concern on shore in the general affairs of the world as any body of men that could be got together. But when they heard that President Garfield was dead they one and all hoisted their bits of flag at half-mast, and so kept them during the day. They held no meeting, passed no resolutions. I suppose not a man among them could have made a speech or drawn up a formal declaration of sorrow. They acted with no concert of any kind. Their way of life makes them all rivals and often enemies. Hartlepool has nothing to say to Lowestoft, Sunderland quarrels with Arbroath, and Whitby itself keeps but ill terms with any of its many guests. But somehow they agreed for this once. The boats that lay in the river above the bridge, next the railway station, were the first to hang out their signal of grief. Those in the port below soon followed. Not long after, without anybody being able to say how the news spread, the fleet at anchor outside the harbor one by one ran up their ensigns, hauled them half down, and there made them fast for the day.
"Amid the innumerable demonstrations of sorrow to be seen and heard these last two days all over England, I know of none which more truly indicates the essentially popular character of the regret which the President's death has excited.... An English friend who was shooting ten days ago over a Yorkshire moor told me that, as the scattered line of sportsmen were pushing through the heather in silence, the gamekeeper met him some yards away, turned and asked: 'Can you tell me, sir, how President Garfield is?' There on that lonely hillside, three thousand miles and more distant from the sufferer, in the early morning, beneath a sun which was not yet shining upon the President, breathing an air he never breathed, this Yorkshire peasant, who had spent his life without so much as hearing the President's name till a few weeks before; who knew not the letters of which it was formed; who knew about grouse and guns and dogs and the weather, and nothing else whatever; whose interest in life never went beyond the stone hut in which he slept and ate, and the stretch of furz-clad upland which lifted itself against the western sky,—he, like the fishermen, had come to think or to feel that, somehow or other, the life or death of that far-away martyr concerned him too. It is easy to say that beneath the shooting-jacket and the jersey beats the same human heart. No doubt it does. But what was it that set it beating in unison with so many millions of others like it with sympathy for the President? Lord Palmerston said he never knew what fame was till he heard of the Tartar mothers on the steppes of Russia in Asia frightening their children into quiet with some queer travesty of his dreaded name. Yorkshire is not so remote as Russian Asia, indeed, but the friendly concern of the gamekeeper was surely a truer measure of real fame than the ignorant terror of the Muscovite mother. I know I thought when I heard it that the President who lay dying would have valued such a proof of the universality of the interest in him not less than those expressions of it—certainly not less genuine—which came from much higher quarters."
Francklyn Cottage, where the President died.
Said another writer:—