“Governor Coney lived in Penobscot, shire-town of Penobscot County, and was judge of the Probate Court. The sheriff of the County had failed, and Mr. Sewall, a citizen, met Judge Coney and said, ‘The sheriff has failed, and you and I are on his bond.’ ‘Well, that’s good,’ said the judge, ‘I guess you can fix it up.’ ‘O, but my name is on the left-hand side, as a witness to his signature.’ So the unlucky judge was left to contemplate the delightful privilege of paying what amounted to a rogue’s bail.”
This same clerk of the Probate Court of former years, but still a friend and neighbor, a man, however, with an unhappy physical disability, came upon the lawn when the large committee to notify him of his nomination were gathered there to perform that duty, and as the man told me, Mr. Blaine caught sight of him off some distance, and “notwithstanding all those men were there, he spoke right up in his old, familiar way, ‘How are you, ——?’”
It shows his genuineness and simplicity. There is enough to him without putting on any airs. It could not be otherwise than that a nature so highly wrought and intense, should be possessed of the powers of withering scorn and just rebuke, and when the occasion required, could use them. There happened such an occasion in 1868.
General Grant had been invited to attend the opening of the European and North American Railway, at Vanceboro’, in the State of Maine. It formed a new connecting-link with the British Provinces. There was a special train of invited guests, and as General Grant was then president, and had never been in the state before, it was quite an honor to be of the company. Mr. Blaine was, of course, of the number, as were the leading citizens without respect to party. A newspaper-correspondent, without any invitation, got aboard the train, and went with the party, and on his return reported that President Grant was drunk. This cut Mr. Blaine to the quick, because of its untruthfulness, and as he was a Republican president, and politics usually ran high in Maine during the palmy days, from 1861 to 1881, when Mr. Blaine was at the helm, and also because the president was guest of the state. Not long after, he met the reporter in the office of Howard Owen, a journalist of Augusta.
“And if you ever saw a man scalped,”—I use the exact language,—“and the grave-clothes put on him, and he put in his coffin, and buried, and the rubbish of the temple thrown on him forty feet deep, he was the man. I never heard anything like it in all my born days: philippics, invectives, satires, these common things were nowhere.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“What didn’t he say?” was the reply,—“‘You were not invited, you were simply tolerated; you sneaked aboard, and then came back here and lied about us,’ etc.”
But sixteen years had effaced much, and yet the impression was vivid, as the man’s very expressive manner betokened.
And a leading Washington correspondent, conversant with all the sights at the capital, says, “It would look strange to see him with the whiskey-drinking crowd at either bar in the capitol building. He does not visit them, and he does not drink.”
The great-heartedness of Mr. Blaine comes out in his book, “Twenty Years in Congress,” and shows how large are his sympathies. He devotes over fifteen pages of that great work to an historical vindication of Brig. Gen. Charles P. Stone, who was the victim chosen to atone for the Ball’s Bluff disaster, in which Col. E. D. Baker, of California, a most gallant officer, lost his life. It is a deeply interesting portion of the seventeenth chapter.