The youthful abstractionist, Lowndes Cleburn, expressed it even better.  “Crutch,” he said, “is like a angel reduced to his bones.  Them air wings or pinions, that he might have flew off with, being a pair of crutches, keeps him here to tarry awhile in our service.  But, gentlemen, he’s not got long to stay.  His crutches is growing too heavy for that expandin’ sperit.  Some day we’ll look up and miss him through our tears.”

They gave him many a present; they put a silver watch in his pocket, and dressed him in a jacket with gilt buttons.  He had a bouquet of flowers to take home every day to that marvellous sister of whom he spoke so often; and there were times when the whole committee, seeing him drop off to sleep as he often did through frail and weary nature, sat silently watching lest he might be wakened before his rest was over.  But no persuasion could take him off the floor of Congress.  In that solemn old Hall of Representatives, under the semicircle of gray columns, he darted with agility from noon to dusk, keeping speed upon his crutches with the healthiest of the pages, and racing into the document-room; and through the dark and narrow corridors of the old Capitol loft, where the House library was lost in twilight.  Visitors looked with interest and sympathy at the narrow back and body of this invalid child, whose eyes were full of bright, beaming spirit.  He sometimes nodded on the steps by the Speaker’s chair; and these spells of dreaminess and fatigue increased as his disease advanced upon his wasting system.  Once he did not awaken at all until adjournment.  The great Congress and audience passed out, and the little fellow still slept, with his head against the Clerk’s desk, while all the other pages were grouped around him, and they finally bore him off to the committee-room in their arms, where, amongst the sympathetic watchers, was old Beau.  When Uriel opened his eyes the old mendicant was looking into them.

“Ah! little Major,” he said, “poor Beau has been waiting for you to take those bad words back.  Old Beau thought it was all bob with his little cove.”

“Beau,” said the boy, “I’ve had such a dream!  I thought my dear father, who is working so hard to bring me home to him, had carried me out on the river in a boat.  We sailed through the greenest marshes, among white lilies, where the wild ducks were tame as they can be.  All the ducks were diving and diving, and they brought up long stalks of celery from the water and gave them to us.  Father ate all his.  But mine turned into lilies and grew up so high that I felt myself going with them, and the higher I went the more beautiful grew the birds.  Oh! let me sleep and see if it will be so again.”

The outcast raised his gold-headed cane and hobbled up and down the room with a laced handkerchief at his eyes.

“Great God!” he exclaimed, “another generation is going out, and here I stay without a stake, playing a lone hand forever and forever.”