The Judge had seen a great light.

    “Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
    That slaves, howe’er contented, never know.”

That the colored people in such numbers risked all for liberty is the best possible proof that they will steadily approach and finally reach the full stature of citizenship in the Republic.

I never saw Mr. Blaine so happy as while with us at Cluny.  He was a boy again and we were a rollicking party together.  He had never fished with a fly.  I took him out on Loch Laggan and he began awkwardly, as all do, but he soon caught the swing.  I shall never forget his first capture: 

“My friend, you have taught me a new pleasure in life.  There are a hundred fishing lochs in Maine, and I’ll spend my holidays in future upon them trout-fishing.”

At Cluny there is no night in June and we danced on the lawn in the bright twilight until late.  Mrs. Blaine, Miss Dodge, Mr. Blaine, and other guests were trying to do the Scotch reel, and “whooping” like Highlanders.  We were gay revelers during those two weeks.  One night afterwards, at a dinner in our home in New York, chiefly made up of our Cluny visitors, Mr. Blaine told the company that he had discovered at Cluny what a real holiday was.  “It is when the merest trifles become the most serious events of life.”

President Harrison’s nomination for the presidency in 1888 came to Mr. Blaine while on a coaching trip with us.  Mr. and Mrs. Blaine, Miss Margaret Blaine, Senator and Mrs. Hale, Miss Dodge, and Walter Damrosch were on the coach with us from London to Cluny Castle.  In approaching Linlithgow from Edinburgh, we found the provost and magistrates in their gorgeous robes at the hotel to receive us.  I was with them when Mr. Blaine came into the room with a cablegram in his hand which he showed to me, asking what it meant.  It read:  “Use cipher.”  It was from Senator Elkins at the Chicago Convention.  Mr. Blaine had cabled the previous day, declining to accept the nomination for the presidency unless Secretary Sherman of Ohio agreed, and Senator Elkins no doubt wished to be certain that he was in correspondence with Mr. Blaine and not with some interloper.

I said to Mr. Blaine that the Senator had called to see me before sailing, and suggested we should have cipher words for the prominent candidates.  I gave him a few and kept a copy upon a slip, which I put in my pocket-book.  I looked and fortunately found it.  Blaine was “Victor”; Harrison, “Trump”; Phelps of New Jersey, “Star”; and so on.  I wired “Trump” and “Star."[76] This was in the evening.

[Footnote 76:  “A code had been agreed upon between his friends in the United States and himself, and when a deadlock or a long contest seemed inevitable, the following dispatch was sent from Mr. Carnegie’s estate in Scotland, where Blaine was staying, to a prominent Republican leader: 

“‘June 25.  Too late victor immovable take trump and star.’  WHIP.  Interpreted, it reads:  ’Too late.  Blaine immovable.  Take Harrison and Phelps.  CARNEGIE.’” (James G. Blaine, by Edward Stanwood, p. 308.  Boston, 1905.)]