and All Saints’ Cathedral, there are places
of note to be seen, such as Howe’s Cave and Sharon
Springs. By this branch of the “D. & H”
system, Cooperstown, rendered famous by James Fenimore
Cooper in his works, is reached. On alighting
from the train at Binghamton I was greeted by my old
friends, Col. Arthur MacArthur, the genial and
accomplished editor of the
Troy Budget, and
that witty soul, Rev. Cornelius L. Twing, Rector of
Calvary Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., who had come here
for the purpose of attending the Annual Conclave of
the Grand Commandery of the State of New York.
At Buffalo I had sufficient time, before taking the
through sleeping car “Sweden,” on the
Erie Railway, to Chicago, to visit the Pan-American
Exposition grounds. The scene, at night, as I
approached, was very impressive. The buildings,
illuminated with electricity furnished by the power-house
at Niagara’s thundering cataract, looked like
palaces of gold. The flood of light was a brilliant
yellow. The main avenue was broad and attractive.
The tower, with the fountains and cascade, appealed
wonderfully to the imagination. Machinery, Agricultural,
and the Electrical buildings, had an air of grandeur.
Music Hall, where the members of Weber’s Orchestra
from Cincinnati were giving a concert before an audience
of three hundred persons, had a melancholy interest
for me. It was here, only a short time before,
that President McKinley, at a public reception, was
stricken down by the hand of an assassin; and the
exact spot was pointed out to me by a policeman.
In that late hour of the evening, as I stood there
rapt in contemplation over the tragic scene which
deprived a nation of one of the wisest and best of
rulers, I seemed to hear his voice uplifted as in
the moment when he was smitten, pleading earnestly
with the horrified citizens and officers around him,
to have mercy on his murderer,—“Let
no one do him harm!” It was Christian, like the
Protomartyr; it was the spirit of the Divine Master,
Who teaches us to pray for our persecutors and enemies!
Happy the nation with such an example before it!
In travelling westward one meets now and then with
original and striking characters. They are interesting,
too, and you can learn lessons of practical wisdom
from them if you will. They will be friendly
and communicative if you encourage them. Answering
this description was a Mr. H.W. Coffman, a dealer
in Short Horn cattle, who was travelling from Buffalo
on the Erie road to Chicago. He lives at Willow
Grove Stock Farm, a hundred miles west of Chicago on
the Great Western Railway, one mile South of German
Valley. Naturally we talked about cows, and we
discussed the different breeds of cattle, especially
the Buffalo cows of the present-day Egypt, and the
Apis of four thousand years ago, which according to
the representations, on the monuments, was more like
the Devon breed than the Buffalo. The names which
he gave to his cows were somewhat poetic. One,
for example, was named “Gold Bud;” and