“In all the cathedral towns the cathedral authorities prescribed services for the occasion.  I omit, because I have no room for them, scores of other accounts, not less significant and not less affecting.  They are all in one tone and one spirit.  Wherever in England, yesterday, two or three were gathered together, President Garfield’s name was heard.  Privately and publicly, simply as between man and man, or formally with the decorous solemnity and stately observance befitting bodies which bear a relation to the Government, a tribute of honest grief was offered to the President and his family, and of honest sympathy to his country.  Steeple spoke to steeple, distant cities clasped hands.  The State, the Church, the people of England were at one together in their sorrow, and in their earnest wish to offer some sort of comfort to their mourning brothers beyond the sea.  You heard in every mouth the old cry, ‘Blood is thicker than water.’  And the voice which is perhaps best entitled to speak for the whole nation added, ’Yes, though the water be a whole Atlantic Ocean.’”

In addition to these impressive demonstrations, the Archbishop of Canterbury held a service and delivered an address in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, on Monday.  Mr. Lowell had been invited, of course, by the church wardens, and a pew reserved for him, but when he reached the church with his party half his pew was occupied.

“The Archbishop, who wore deep crape over his Episcopal robes, avoided calling his discourse a sermon, and avoided, likewise, through the larger portion of it, the purely professional tone common in the pulpit on such occasions.  During a great part of his excellent address he spoke, as anybody else might have done, of the manly side of the President’s character.  He gave, moreover, his own view of the reason why all England has been so strangely moved.  ’During the long period of the President’s suffering,’ said the Archbishop, ’we had time to think what manner of man this was over whom so great a nation was mourning day by day.  We learned what a noble history his was, and we were taught to trace a career such as England before knew nothing of.’

“Among the innumerable testimonies to the purity and beauty of Garfield’s character,” says Mr. Smalley, “this address of the Primate of the English Church surely is one which all Americans may acknowledge with grateful pride.”

CHAPTER XXXV.

MR. DEPEW’S ESTIMATE OF GARFIELD.

My task is drawing near a close.  I have, in different parts of this volume, expressed my own estimate of our lamented President.  No character in our history, as it seems to me, furnishes a brighter or more inspiring example to boys and young men.  It is for this reason that I have been induced to write the story of his life especially for American boys, conceiving that in no way can I do them a greater service.