Cleveland County herald., 1919-05-15
CHAPTER XVIII.
On the Summit

My mental assets would give me poor rating, I presume, in the eom- merce of modern scholarship when I went to Washington that autumn with Senator and Mrs. Wright. Still it was no smattering that I had, but rather few broad areas of knowledge which were firmly in my possession. My best asset was not mental but spiritual, if I may be allowed to say it. in all mod esty, for, therein I claim no special ad- vantage, saving, possibly, an unusual strength of character in my aunt and uncle. Those days the candles were lighting the best trails of knowledge all over the land. Never has the gen. eral spirit of this republic been Sd high and admirable as then and a little later. It was to speak, presently, in the immortal voices of Whittier. Emer- son, Whitman, Greeley and Lincoln. The dim glow of the candles had en- tered their souls and out of them came light that filled the land and was seen of all men.
 The railroads on which we travelled from Utica, the great cities through which we passed, were a wonder and an inspiration to me. I was awed by the grandeur of Washington itself. I took lodgings with the senator and his wife.
 "Now, Bart" said he, when we had arrived, "Im going to turn you loose here for little while before put har- ness on you. Go about for a week or so and get the lay of the land and the feel of 1t. Mrs. Wright will be your guide until the general situation has worked its way into your conscious ness."
 It seemed to me that there was not room enough in my consciousness for the great public buildings and the pie lures and the statues and the vast ma- chinery of the government. Beauty and magnitude have a wonderful ef- feet when they spring fresh upon the vision of youth out of the back eoun- try. l sang of the look of them in my letters and soon I began to think about them and imperfectly to understand them. They had their epic, lyric and dramatic stages in my consciousness.
 One afternoon we went to hear Sen- ator Wright speak. He was to an- swer Calhoun on a detail of the bank ing laws. The floor and galleries were filled. With what emotion I saw him rise and begin his argument as all ears bent to hear him! He aimed not at popular sentiments in highly finished rhetoric, as did Webster, to be quoted in the school books and repeated on every platform. But no words of mine and 1 have used many in the effort are able to convey a notion of the masterful ease and charm of his man. ner on the floor of the senate or of the singular modeSty, courtesy, aptness and simplicity of his words as they fell from his lips. There were the thunderous Webster, the grandeur of whose sentences no American has equaled; the agile-minded Clay, whose voice was like silver clarion; the far seeing, fiery Calhoun, of "the swift SWord'-most formidable in debate but I was soon to learn that neither nor all of these men-gifted of heaven so highly-could cope with the suave, incisive, conversational sentences of Wright, going straight to the heart of the subject and laying it bare to his hearers. That was what people were saving as we left the senate chamber late in the evening; that, indeed, was what they were always saying after they had heard him answer an ad- versary.
 (TO BE CoNTINUED.)