“Bart, do you know when our first fathers turned out of the trail of the beast and found the long road of humanity?  I think it was when they discovered the compass in their hearts.”

So now at last we have come to that high and lonely place, where we may look back upon the toilsome, adventurous way we have traveled with the aid of the candle and the compass.  Now let us stop a moment to rest and to think.  How sweet the air is here!  The night is falling.  I see the stars in the sky.  Just below me is the valley of Eternal Silence.  You will understand my haste now.  I have sought only to do justice to my friend and to give my country a name, long neglected, but equal in glory to those of Washington and Lincoln.

Come, let us take one last look together down the road we have traveled, now dim in the evening shadows.  Scattered along it are the little houses of the poor of which I have written.  See the lights in the windows—­the lights that are shining into the souls of the young—­the eager, open, expectant, welcoming souls of the young!—­and the light carries many things, but best of all a respect for the old, unchanging way of the compass.  After all that is the end and aim of the whole matter—­believe me.

My life has lengthened into these days when most of our tasks are accomplished by machinery.  We try to make men by the thousand, in vast educational machines, and no longer by the one as of old.  It was the loving, forgiving, forbearing, patient, ceaseless toil of mother and father on the tender soul of childhood, which quickened that inextinguishable sense of responsibility to God and man in these people whom I now leave to the judgment of my countrymen.

I have lived to see the ancient plan of kingcraft, for self-protection, coming back into the world.  It demands that the will and conscience of every individual shall be regulated and controlled by some conceited prince, backed by an army.  It can not fail, I foresee, to accomplish such devastation in the human spirit as shall imperil the dearest possession of man.

If one is to follow the compass he can have but one king—­his God.

* * * * *

I am near the end.  I rode back to Baltimore that forenoon.  They had nominated Mr. Polk, of Tennessee, for president and Silas Wright for vice-president, the latter by acclamation.  I knew that Wright would decline the honor, as he did.

I hurried northward to keep my appointment with Sally.  The boats were slowed by fog.  At Albany I was a day behind my schedule.  I should have only an hour’s leeway if the boats on the upper lakes and the stage from Plattsburg were on time.  I feared to trust them.  So I caught the west-bound train and reached Utica three hours late.  There I bought a good horse and his saddle and bridle and hurried up the north road.  When he was near spent I traded him for a well-knit Morgan mare up in the little village of Sandy Creek.  Oh, I knew a good