The tea-things had just been cleared away, the baby just got fast asleep and laid in his crib, my wife just got fixed by the round-table making a blue velvet cap for him, and I had just got comfortably settled in my arm-chair on the other side of the table, when Tom returned from the post-office through the rain and mud and dark bringing one letter. My wife gave a pish! when I told her it was not from her mother, but apologized immediately for her expression when I informed her that the letter—broad, thick and with a vast deal of ink in the superscription—was from Charley. Giving the wick of the lard-lamp another turn she begged me to read it aloud.
Tearing off the envelope—drawing my chair a little nearer the fire and clearing my throat I read—
Rev. W.——
“My dear W.—Elected! Apart from all nonsense and affectation I am heartily glad of it! of course I received the congratulations of every body here quietly, as if it was all a matter of course that I should be elected Senator, but with you I have no reserve. Know then, my very dear W., that I am glad I am elected. For three reasons. First, because I am elected while just barely of the requisite age: Second, because I am elected by an overwhelming majority—20 to 1: Third, because it places me out in a free and higher field of usefulness and energy. Why I feel as if I had just begun my life. I have not attained the end—only the beginning of my ambition. I don’t think that it ought to be branded as ambition—this feeling of mine either. I don’t think it is ambition. It is a purer feeling—A wish, an eagerness, a nature to be doing, influencing, bettering as wide a sphere as I possibly can. I was elected without any art on my part whatever. I told the people exactly what I was, and what I intended to try to do if they elected me. I intend to be just exactly what I am! If I were to try to appear other than exactly that I would look as well as feel mean—my arm would falter in every gesture, my tongue stammer, my knees shake—I would become weak—weak physically, mentally, utterly! A pure-minded, single-intentioned, whole-souled manner in thought, word and deed has borne me thus far like a straight arrow from a true bow. It is the shortest, best way to cleave the future, I know.
“There is a fourth reason why I do rejoice in my election. It is because I know that you will rejoice in it. It is you my friend who have made me high-thoughted and far-thoughted. It is you who during the last twenty years have been my good genius—in your conversation when present with me—in your correspondence when absent from——”
I read the rest of the letter to my wife, but it is entirely too flattering to me to be coolly written out here. Indeed I remarked all along, through the three more pages which followed, to my wife, that his encomiums were only the warm expressions of a warm soul unusually excited, and which must be taken with all allowance.
Charley’s letter flushed me through and through. That my old friend should be elected Senator to congress from his State I hoped but hardly expected. Intimate companionship with a friend, you know, has a tendency to dwindle him in our eyes. Don’t misunderstand! Intimacy with such a man as Charles Bell makes one love and prize him more and more—but does not make one think more and more that such a man is suited to be a grave and reserved Senator. It is just as it is with the Swiss peasant whose cabin is on a side of Mont Blanc—the hoary old mountain does not appear a tithe so sublime to him as it does to some traveler in the distance.
I say I felt thoroughly warmed and rejoiced. I arose, put all my wife’s spools and scraps off the table into her lap, laid my portfolio and ink-stand upon it, begged my wife to absorb herself in her baby’s velvet cap, dipped my pen in the ink and now have written thus far.
All my past intercourse with Charley rushes to my lips now, as tears do sometimes to one’s eyes. I want to tell just as briefly and distinctly as possible how he has risen from nothing to what he now is. I know much better than he—and if he reads this, it will do him good. Any-how, I feel in the mood of writing, and before I go to bed, if my baby don’t wake with the colic and my wife don’t interrupt me I will tell you exactly how Charley Bell became a United States Senator.
The fact is, too, that I have a half-hope that some youth may read this and may get a word which may wake him to a higher and nobler life than he has ever yet dreamed of. If the eye of any such a one rests on these pages, just one word my fine fellow. Forget for a little while that everlasting Julia whom you fell in love with last Tuesday a week ago, and read with all your soul of souls.