At Baltimore the train was reversed, the catafalque car being placed in front, while the others occupied their relative positions in the rear.
Darkness came shortly after the train left Baltimore, and the lights of farm houses in the country still revealed the waiting watchers—always standing, always uncovered, always mutely joining in the universal expression of grief.
Night enveloped the Capital City in its mighty pall as the funeral procession ended. The train pulled into the depot at 8:38. The run from Buffalo had been made in an average of thirty-five miles an hour. The President and his friends alighted. Mrs. McKinley was assisted to her carriage. The stalwart soldiers and sailors gently lifted the casket from its place in the car and carried it through a waiting, silent, tearful crowd, to the hearse at the gates, and it was driven slowly along the streets to the White House.
It was a sad home-coming. Just two weeks before President McKinley, full of life and crowned with all the honors that a successful career could earn, happy in the love of his people and the respect of the world, had gone to visit the Buffalo Exposition; to lend some measure of encouragement to that enterprise, and to see the marvels that had been there assembled. In the midst of them he had fallen. And here, at the end of a fortnight, in the darkness of an autumn night, in the silence of an inexpressible sorrow, his hearse was rolling dully along the avenue, and only the prayers and eulogies and lying in state separated all that was mortal of William McKinley from the unending rest of the grave.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE LAST NIGHT IN THE WHITE HOUSE.
Borne upon the shoulders of stalwart representatives of the army and navy, of which he had been Commander-in-Chief for more than four years, all that was mortal of William McKinley, late President of the United States, was returned to the capital of the nation.
As President McKinley left the White House the morning of July 5 for a vacation trip to his home at Canton, O., some of the attachés of the Executive Mansion assembled on the portico to bid him a fond farewell and express their hope for a pleasant trip.
“Take good care of yourselves, boys, until I come back in the fall,” was the President’s response as he entered his waiting carriage and was driven to the railroad station to take the train for home. These were the last words ever uttered by William McKinley in the shadow of the big white mansion which had been his official residence since March 4, 1897.
He came back in the fall, as he had promised he would, not in the flush of manhood, buoyant in spirits and recuperated from the arduous duties of his official position, but in a narrow, black-cloth-covered casket, around which were draped the colors he had fought to defend when in his teens, and which in maturer years he had seen floating victoriously in every quarter of the globe.
Following his bier as chief mourner came his successor to the Presidency, Theodore Roosevelt, accompanied by the members of his official family and thousands of his countrymen, who mourned in silence his untimely end.