Shortly Mr. Blaine entered, all cheer and sunshine. He was a handsome man, with his fine erect form, his intellectual face, his genial smile, his great, big heart. He did not need the Presidency to make him great. Though able for very hard work still, he was looking very white in the face, his hair was quite gray. He talked to us for a time about the need of keeping well. Did he have premonitions then? “Never sleep in a room without a window raised, be it ever so little,” he said, “and don’t go to late night banquets in crowded rooms. Secretary Windom,” he went on, “has been murdered by trying to please crowds, speaking to them when he ought to have been in bed. I am done letting people make an exhibition of me. I will never, never sit in a room full of smokers again, and sacrifice health for others’ curiosity. That’s all they want of public men in such places, and one can die at it just as Windom has done.”[11]
After a while I wondered if the Secretary had forgotten the object of our call. Senator Wilson hinted at it at last, and Mr. Blaine got up, walked about the room and said: “Really, now, I have been too busy to keep my promise.” He asked us to come to him again, and fixed the morning. “Bring with you the consular list and we will go all over it together.” He also spoke of a kind letter on file in my interests from General Sherman, who was then very ill in New York.
That afternoon, while on a street car going over to the Capitol, I heard the conductor tell a passenger that General Sherman was dead. I was greatly moved and pained. A thousand instances of his friendship for me rushed through my mind. In a few minutes I heard, from a seat in the Senate Gallery, the eulogiums pronounced by Senators Evarts, Hawley and Manderson. Hawley almost broke down in tears. The Senate adjourned, and probably every loyal heart in America was in sorrow. The Southerners in the Senate that afternoon, sat still, and heard the eulogies on Sherman in perfect silence. I wondered that not one of them had the nobility to rise in his seat and speak of the great dead.
I went to New York and on the morning of the funeral was with the family at the Sherman home. In the little back parlor, in the full uniform of his highest rank, lay the commander of the March to the Sea. Candles burned around his coffin in the darkened chamber. While I was standing there, looking at his face, his son, Father Thomas E. Sherman, who had that moment reached home from Europe, came into the room. He embraced me, for we had many mutual memories.
A short Catholic service was held by the children that morning over all that was left of their illustrious father. They were all sincere Catholics. The mother, devoted to the same church, had died in the room upstairs. The father had been reconciled to his children’s kind of religion. He was not a professor of any creed himself, and for his children to have this farewell ceremony, conducted by his own son, seemed in every way appropriate.
That afternoon, New York City and the people of America buried General Sherman. A more imposing funeral was never seen in the United States, not even at the death of Washington.
Shortly, Senator Wilson and I, on invitation, went to Secretary Blaine’s home again. There was a bright “Good morning, Mr. Wilson,” as the Secretary again entered the drawing-room. Seeing me, he walked across the room, took me by the hand and congratulated me on my reappointment. “Your name goes to the Senate this afternoon for St. Gall,” he continued, “the post shall shortly be increased in rank, and you will be made Consul General for Switzerland.” He offered me my old post at Zurich, however, if I preferred it. I never saw Mr. Blaine again.