But I must not digress—the particular thing I wish to explain is that one day at recess the best scholar was in tears, and I went to her and asked what was the matter, and she told me that some of the big girls had openly declared that she—my fine, freckled girl, the check-aproned, the invincible—held her place at the head of the school only through favoritism.
I burned with rage and resentment and proposed fight; then I burst out crying and together we mingled our tears.
All this was long ago. Since then I have been in many climes, and met many men, and read history a bit—I hope not without profit. And this I have learned: that the person who stands at the head of his class (be he country lad or presidential candidate) is always the target for calumny and the unkindness of contemporaries who can neither appreciate nor understand.
Not long ago I spent several days at Auburn, New York, so named by some pioneer who, when the Nineteenth Century was very young, journeyed thitherward with a copy of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" in his pack.
Auburn is a flourishing city of thirty thousand inhabitants. It has beautiful wide streets, lined with elms that in places form an archway. There are churches to spare and schools galore and handsome residences. Then there are electric cars and electric lights and dynamos, with which men electricute other men in the wink of an eye. I saw the "fin-de-siecle" guillotine and sat in the chair, and the jubilant patentee told me that it was the quickest scheme for extinguishing life ever invented—patented Anno Christi Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five. Verily we live in the age of the Push-Button! And as I sat there I heard a laugh that was a quaver, and the sound of a stout cane emphasizing a jest struck against the stone floor.
"We didn't have such things when I was a boy!" came the tremulous voice.
And then the newcomer explained to me that he was eighty-seven years old last May, and that he well remembered a time when a plain oaken gallows and a strong rope were good enough for Auburn—"provided Bill Seward didn't get the fellow free," added my new-found friend.
Then the old man explained that he used to be a guard on the walls, and now he had a grandson who occupied the same office, and in answer to my question said he knew Seward as though he were a brother. "Bill, he was the luckiest man ever in Auburn—he married rich and tumbled over bags of money if he just walked on the street. He believed in neither God nor devil and had a pompous way o' makin' folks think he knew all about everything. To make folks think you know is just as well as to know, I s'pose!" and the old man laughed and struck his cane on the echoing floor of the cell.
The sound and the place and the company gave me a creepy feeling, and I excused myself and made my way out past armed guards, through doorways where iron bars clicked and snapped, and steel bolts that held in a thousand men shot back to let me out, out into a freer air and a better atmosphere. And as I passed through the last overhanging arch where a one-armed guard wearing a G.A.R. badge turned a needlessly big key, there came unbeckoned across my inward sight a vision of a check-aproned girl in tears, sobbing with head on desk. And I said to myself: "Yes, yes! country girl or statesman, you shall drink the bitter potion that is the penalty of success—drink it to the very dregs. If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing—court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie."
All mud sticks, but no mud is immortal, and that senile fling at the name of Seward is the last flickering, dying word of detraction that can be heard in the town that was his home for full half a century, or in the land he served so well. And yet it was in Auburn that mob spirit once found a voice; and when Seward was Lincoln's most helpful adviser, and his sons were at the front serving the country's cause, cries of "Burn his house! Burn his house!" came to the distracted ears of wife and daughter.