“That’s cool!”
“Ya-as,” the fellow blustered out, “of course it is; thar’s ice in it!”
Few toasts touch the heart of Mr. Blaine more deeply than the great toast of the family and of friendship, and one to which he could respond with the happiest grace and the liveliest good cheer, “Here’s to those we love, and those who love us! God bless them!”
Mr. Blaine drinks no liquors, not even the lightest kinds of wine, I am credibly informed by one who was with him on those occasions, and frequently at his table.
Mrs. Blaine, like her husband, is a great reader, and while a devoted mother and faithful wife, never neglecting her home, husband, or her children, has kept herself well informed, and is intelligent and attractive in conversation.
Old friends say, “I do love to hear Mrs. Blaine talk; she has a fine mind, is so well educated, and so well informed.”
An old school-mate testifies that she was a fine scholar when at the academy over the river from her present home, and that she also studied and finished her education at Ipswich.
She has trained her children with a skill that few mothers could command. Her children are her jewels, and are loved with a mother’s affection. They are as stars, while her husband is as the great sun shining in the heaven of her joys.
The present Augusta home has been, for years, little more than a summer-resort, to which they have come the first of June. Their great home has been in Washington. This, for twenty years, has been life’s centre to them. Here home-life has reached its zenith; its glories have shone the brightest; it has been at the nation’s capital, and husband and father among the first men of the nation. Wealth has been at their command, to make that home all they desired. They could fill it with the realizations of their choicest ideals, and friends, almost worshipers, have come and gone with the days and hours, from all parts of the nation. They have lived in the nation’s life. They have been in the onward drift and trend of things, ever on the foremost wave, caught in the onward rush of events. Life has been of the intensest kind, rich in all that enriches, noble in all that ennobles. They have occupied a large place in the nation, and the nation has occupied a large place in them; and yet, though at the very farthest remove from the quiet, simple life of the cottage or the farm, it has been an American home; it could be no other with such a united head, and retains much of the old simplicity. The habits of early life are still on them, and in nothing are they estranged from the people.
It has been an experience with them so long, and came on so early in its beginnings, and gradually, that they have become accustomed to honor and distinction.