I well remember the first time I saw Thomas Marshall.  He had returned from Washington, where he had thrilled Congress by his eloquence.  He was announced to speak in Lexington on court day afternoon.  I went with my father from our country home to hear the then golden mouthed orator.  For nearly two hours he swayed that audience as the storm king sways the mountain pine.  On unseen wings of eloquence he soared to heights I had never imagined within the reach of mortal tongue.

I also remember the last time I saw this brilliant Kentuckian.  He was standing on a street corner in Lexington, Kentucky.  His hair hung a tangled mass about his forehead, his eagle eyes were dimmed by debauch, and a thin, worn coat was buttoned over soiled linen.  As he straightened himself and started to the bar-room, I could see traces of greatness lingering about his brow like sheet lightning about the bosom of a summer storm cloud.  Not long after he was telling political stories in a drinking tavern.  When he tired of the tumult of the bar-room and a sense of his better self came over him, some one said:  “Give us another, Tom.”  Rising to his feet he said:  “You remind me of a set of bantam chickens, picking the sore head of an eagle when his wings are broken.”

At one time in a temperance revival in Washington he took the pledge and kept it for months.  During this time in a temperance meeting he was called upon to speak.  The following brief extract shows the charm of his eloquence: 

“I would not exchange my conscious being as a strictly sober man, the glad play with which my pulse now beats healthful music through my veins, the bounding vivacity with which my life blood courses its exultant way through every fiber of my frame, the communion high which my now healthful eye and ear hold with the universe around me, the splendors of the morning, the softness of the evening sky, the beauty, the verdure of the earth, the music of winds and waters.  No, sir! with all these grand associations of external nature re-opened to the avenues of sense, though poverty dogged me, though scorn pointed its slow finger at me as I passed, though want, destitution and every element of early misery, save only crime, met my waking eye from day to day:  Not for the brightest wreath that ever encircled a statesman’s brow; not if some angel commissioned by heaven, or rather some demon sent from hell to test the resisting power of my virtuous resolution, were to tempt me back to the blighting bowl; not for the honors a world could bestow, would I cast from me this pledge of a liberated mind, this talisman against temptation, and plunge again into the horrors that once beset my path.  So help me Heaven, I would spurn beneath my feet all the gifts a universe could offer, and live and die as I am—­poor but sober.”