The funeral train slipped out of Washington at 8:20 o’clock, leaving an uncovered multitude behind. At Baltimore thousands were in waiting. The train stopped only long enough to change engines and then started northward.
All along the way railroad operations were suspended. Not a bell rang, not a whistle blew, not a wheel turned. It was as if the whole world knelt in the presence of the nation’s dead.
Throughout the night the train passed between a constant line of camp fires through the valleys and among the hills of Pennsylvania. As the black draped engine approached the gathered people rose, and by the flickering of their camp fires they could be seen and heard standing with bared heads and singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
Gangs of miners came up from the shaft on dozens of hillsides, their lamps gleaming through the night as they stood caps in hand to show their regard for a statesman who was ever their friend.
Solitary track walkers turned aside and uncovered. That was the supreme evidence of reverential honor. When one man does that in the isolation and darkness of the night he does it because it expresses what is in his heart.
At Harrisburg 20,000 people remained in the street around the railroad station until long after midnight. Then the train plunged into the Juniata valley and commenced its long climb over the mountains. And still camp fires glowed beside the track and still voices were raised throughout the night in that old hymn which has become a nation’s funeral chant.
Half the population of Johnstown, the first of the great steel manufacturing centers through which the train passed, was at the track and a company of local militia stood drawn up at attention. Four women with uplifted hands knelt on the station platform. From the smoke-covered city came the sound of the church bells tolling out the universal sorrow as the train slowed down that the people might better see the impressive spectacle within the observation car—the casket with its burden of flowers, the two grim, armed sentries on guard, “one at the head and the other at the foot.”
Those in the Canton reception committee rode as if to the funeral of one their own kin. They had known William McKinley and worked with him in business and official and social life for years. They loved him as a brother, and as a brother they mourned his death.
Some of them gave way utterly to their emotions and wept like children. A notable example was Judge Isaac H. Taylor. He had served in Congress with Mr. McKinley when they represented adjoining districts. Away back in the ’80s, when the Congressional map of Ohio was remade, the counties in which they lived were thrown into the same district. Both had hosts of friends. Both wanted to go back to Congress. The district was nearly evenly divided between them. If the contest for the nomination in the new district had gone to the point such political rivalries usually reach, both might have had to give way to a new man.
In that contingency Judge Taylor had the eye of the prophet and a breast full of admiration for his rival. He went to him and said: