After the meeting Edward drove home with Mr. Beecher. After a while he asked: "Well, how do you think it went?"
Edward replied he thought it went very well, except that he did not like the reference to ex-President Hayes.
"What reference? What did I say?"
Edward repeated it.
"Did I say that?" he asked. Edward looked at him. Mr. Beecher's face was tense. After a few moments he said: "That's generally the way with extemporaneous remarks: they are always dangerous. The best impromptu speeches and remarks are the carefully prepared kind," he added.
Edward told him he regretted the reference because he knew that General Hayes would read it in the New York papers, and he would be nonplussed to understand it, considering the cordial relations which existed between the two men. Mr. Beecher knew of Edward's relations with the ex-President, and they had often talked of him together.
Nothing more was said of the incident. When the Beecher home was reached Mr. Beecher said: "Just come in a minute." He went straight to his desk, and wrote and wrote. It seemed as if he would never stop. At last he handed Edward an eight-page letter, closely written, addressed to General Hayes.
"Read that, and mail it, please, on your way home. Then it'll get there just as quickly as the New York papers will."
It was a superbly fine letter,—one of those letters which only Henry Ward Beecher could write in his tenderest moods. And the reply which came from Fremont, Ohio, was no less fine!