The other series of reports said that Mr. Blaine was vigorous; went up the front steps of his house at a bound; was doing more work than ever, and was rollicking with mirth.  The baleful story was ascribed to his enemies, who wanted the great man out of the world.  The reassuring story was ascribed to his friends, who wanted to keep him in the ranks of Presidential possibilities.

The fact is that both reports were true.  There were two Mr. Blaines, as there are two of every mercurial temperament.  Of the phlegmatic, slow-pulsed man there is only one.  You see him once and you see him as he always is.  Not so with the nervous organisation.  He has as many moods as the weather, as many changes as the sky.  He is bright or dull, serene or tempestuous, cold or hot, up or down, January or August, day or night, Arctic or tropical.  At Washington, in 1889, I saw the two Blaines within two hours.  I called with my son to see the great Secretary of State at his office, and although it was his day for seeing foreign diplomats, he received us with great cordiality.  His face was an illumination; his voice resonant; his manner animated; he was full of gesticulation.  He walked up and down the room describing things under discussion; fire in his eye, spring in his step.  Although about fifty-nine years of age, he looked forty-five, and strong enough to wrestle with two or three ordinary men.  He had enough vitality for an athlete.

We parted.  My son and I went down the street, made two or three other calls, and on the way noticed a carriage passing with two or three people in it.  My attention was startled by the appearance in that carriage of what seemed a case of extreme invalidism.  The man seemed somewhat bolstered up.  My sympathies were immediately aroused, and I said to my son, “Look at that sick man riding yonder.”  When the carriage came nearer to us, my son said, “That is Mr. Blaine.”  Looking closely at the carriage I found that this was so.  He had in two hours swung from vigour to exhaustion, from the look of a man good for twenty years of successful work to a man who seemed to be taking his last ride.  He simply looked as he felt on both occasions.  We had seen the two Blaines.

How much more just we would be in our judgment of men if we realised that a man may be honestly two different men, and how this theory would explain that which in every man of high organisation seems sometimes to be contradictory!  Aye, within five minutes some of us with mercurial natures can remember to have been two entirely different men in two entirely different worlds.  Something said to us cheering or depressing; some tidings announced, glad or sad; some great kindness done for us, or some meanness practised on us have changed the zone, the pulsation, the physiognomy, the physical, the mental, the spiritual condition, and we become no more what we were than summer is winter, or midnoon is midnight, or frosts are flowers.