configuration.  He, while comparatively short-bodied, had, as all the world knows, an abnormal length of limb, a fact which I suppose will account for much of his ungainly manner.  In an ordinary chair he was undoubtedly uncomfortable, and hence his familiar attitude with his feet on the table or over the mantelpiece.  The two fought each other long and sternly on those memorable platforms in Illinois in 1858, and in their physique there must have been, as they stood side by side, a grotesque parody of their intellectual want of harmony.  Douglas’s usual sobriquet was “the little giant,” and it fitted well—­a man of stalwart proportions oddly “sawed off.”  His voice was vibrant and sonorous, his mien compelling.  It was no great speech, a few sentences of compliment to the city and of good-natured banter of the political foes among whom he found himself; but it was ex pede Herculem, a leader red-blooded to the finger-tips.  I treasure the memory of this brief touch into which I once came with Douglas for I have come to think more kindly of him as he has receded.  Not a few will now admit that, taken generally, his doctrine of “squatter sovereignty” was right.  Congress ought not to have power to fix a status for people of future generations.  If a status so fixed becomes repugnant it will be repudiated, and rightfully.  Douglas was certainly cool over the woes of the blacks; but he refused, it is said, to grow rich, when the opportunity offered, from the ownership of slaves or from the proceeds of their sale.  His rally to the side of Lincoln at last was finely magnanimous and it was a pleasant scene, at the inauguration of March 4, 1861, when Douglas sat close by holding Lincoln’s hat.  There was an interview between the two men behind closed doors, on the night the news of Sumter came, of which one would like to have a report.  Lincoln came out from it to issue, through the Associated Press, his call for troops, and Douglas to send by the same channel the appeal to his followers to stand by the Government.  What could the administration have done without the faithful arms and hearts of the War Democrats?  And what other voice but that of Douglas could have rallied them to its support?  Had he lived it seems inevitable that the two so long rivals would have been close friends—­that Douglas would have been in Lincoln’s Cabinet, perhaps in Stanton’s place.  This, however, is not a memory but a might-have-been, and those are barred out in this Last Leaf.

Daniel Webster came home to die in 1852.  He was plainly failing fast, but the State for which he stood hoped for the best, and arranged that he should speak, as so often before, in Faneuil Hall.  As I walked in from Harvard College, over the long “caterpillar bridge” through Cambridge Street and Dock Square, my freshman mind was greatly perplexed.  My mother’s family were perfervid Abolitionists, accepting the extremest utterances of Garrison and Wendell Phillips.  I was now in that environment, and felt strong impress