“I read your sermons,” I said to him first.

“Everybody reads yours,” he replied.

Spurgeon made a long battle against disease; the last few months in agony.  His name is on the honour roll of the world’s history, but for many years he was caricatured and assailed.  He kept a scrap-book of the printed blasphemy against him.  The first picture I ever saw of him represented him as sliding down the railing of his pulpit in the presence of his congregation, to show how easy it was to go to hell, and then climbing up on the opposite railing to show how difficult it was to get to heaven.  Most people at the time actually believed that he had done this.

In this same month Dr. Mackenzie, the famous physician, died, and my old friend, the Rev. Dr. Hanna of Belfast, the leading Protestant minister of Ireland.  Out of the darkness into the light; out of the struggle into victory; out of earth into Heaven!

There was always mercy on earth, however, for those who remained.  Mercy!  The biggest word in the human language!  I remember how it impressed me, when, at the invitation of Dr. Leslie Keeley, the inventor of the “Gold Cure” for drunkenness, I visited his institution at Dwight, Ill.  It was a new thing then and a most merciful miracle of the age.  It settled no question, perhaps, but intensified the blessings of reformed thought.

There were questions that could not be solved, however, questions of industrial moment that we almost despaired of.  The tariff was one of them.  I felt convinced that the tariff question would never be settled.  The grandchildren of every generation will always be discussing it, and thresh out the same old straw which the Democrats and Republicans were discussing before them.  When I was a boy only eight years old the tariff was discussed just as warmly as it will ever be.  Like my friend Henry Watterson, of Kentucky, I was a Free Trader.  Politics were so mixed up it was difficult to see ahead.  Cleveland was after Hill and Hill was after Cleveland; that alone was clear to everybody.

For my own satisfaction, in the spring of 1892, I went to see what Washington was really doing, thinking, living.  It had improved morally and politically, its streets were still the trail of the mighty.  A great change had taken place there.

A higher type of men had taken possession of our national halls.  Duelling, once common, was entirely abolished, and a Senator who would challenge a fellow-member to fight would make himself a laughing-stock.  No more clubbing of Senators on account of opposite opinions!  Mr. Covode of Pennsylvania, no longer brandished a weapon over the head of Mr. Barksdale of Mississippi.  Grow and Keitt no more took each other by the throat.  Griswold no more pounded Lyon, Lyon snatching the tongs and striking back until the two members in a scuffle rolled on the floor of the great American Congress.  One of the Senators of twenty-five years ago died in Flatbush Hospital,