on the sun-crowned heights of victory. The granite shaft may commemorate their deeds, our American Valhalla may be crowded with the statues of our heroes, but our debt of gratitude to them can never be paid while time shall last and the history of a nation shall endure.

"If my voice, from this Representative hall, could be heard throughout the land, I would adjure all who love the Republic to preserve this obligation ever fresh in grateful hearts. The dead, who have fallen in these struggles to prevent an alien flag from waving over the ashes of Washington, or over the graves where sleep the great and patriotic rivals of the last generation, the hero of New Orleans and the illustrious Commoner of Kentucky, cannot return to us. On Shiloh's plain and Carolina's sandy shore, before Richmond, and above the clouds at Lookout Mountain, the patriot martyrs of constitutional liberty sleep in their bloody shrouds till the morning of the resurrection. But the living are left behind, and if the Sacred Record appropriately commends the poor, who are ever with us, to our benefactions and regard, may I not remind you that the widow and the fatherless, the maimed and the wounded, the diseased and the suffering, whose anguish springs from this great contest, have claims on all of us, heightened immeasurably by the sacred cause for which they have given so much? Thus, and thus alone, by pouring the oil of consolation into the wounds that wicked treason has made, can we prove our devotion to our fatherland and our affectionate gratitude to its defenders. And, rejoicing over the bow of promise we already see arching the storm-cloud of war, giving assurance that no deluge of secession shall again overwhelm or endanger

our nation, we can join, with heart and soul, sincerely and trustingly, in the poet's prayer:

“Now, Father, lay Thy healing hand
In mercy on our stricken land;
Lead all its wanderers to the fold,
And be their Shepherd, as of old.

"So shall our nation's song ascend
To Thee, our Ruler, Father, Friend;
While heaven's wide arch resounds again
With peace on earth, good-will to men.'

"We go hence, with our official labors ended, to the Senate chamber and the portico of the Capitol, there, with the statue of the Goddess of Liberty looking down for the first time from her lofty pedestal on such a scene, to witness and participate in the inauguration of the Elect of the American people. And now, thanking you most truly for the approbation of my official conduct which you have recorded on your journal, I declare the House of Representatives of the Thirty-eighth Congress of the United States adjourned sine die."

THE

CHAPTER XXIV.

CONTEMPLATED OVERLAND JOURNEY-THE LAST GOOD-BYE OF MR. LINCOLN THE PRESIDENT'S ASSASSINATION-MR. COLFAX'S EULOGY UPON THE MAR

TYRED PRESIDENT.

BEFORE the war of the rebellion, Mr. Colfax had planned an overland journey to California and Oregon.

He had expected to take this journey during the summer of 1861. The breaking out of the war caused its indefinite postponement. In the spring of 1865, when every thing gave promise of the speedy extinction of the Confederacy, this journey was again determined upon. Upon the 14th of April, Mr. Colfax was in Washington. He called early in the morning upon the President. Mr. Lincoln spent over an hour with him con versing in regard to the future, and explaining how he hoped to heal the wounds of the war, and build upon a sure foundation the great Republic. He also received from Mr. Lincoln a message for the miners of the far West. In the early evening, Mr. Colfax in company with Mr. George Ashmun of Massachusetts, who had presided over the Chicago Convention that nominated Mr. Lincoln for President, again called upon him. Amidst the rejoicings in Washington that day, on account of the successive national victories, it had been announced by the papers of the day, that General Grant, who had just returned to Washington from his final victory over Lee, and the President, would be at Ford's theatre that night. General Grant had an engagement, which prevented him from attending. The President was reluctant upon that occasion to attend, but was persuaded to go, that the people might not be disappointed. Mr. Colfax walked from the parlor to the door with the President, and at the door bade him "good-bye," declining his invitation to accompany him to the theatre, on account of his own engagements that evening. It was doubtless the last good-bye ever uttered by the President. It was the fatal night of his assassination.

No one, outside of the immediate family of the mar

tyred President, felt more keenly or deeply than Mr. Colfax the demoniacal crime that robbed the country of its good President and wise and patriotic head. One of the finest eulogies of President Lincoln and most faithful portraitures of his character, came almost impromptu from the heart of Mr. Colfax. After his return from Washington, it was written during a single night for his riends and neighbors at South Bend. It was repeated oy invitation of the Christian Commission at Bryan Hall, Chicago, Sabbath evening, April 30th, to an audience which crowded the hall an hour before the time of its delivery. It is a delineation of Mr. Lincoln's character, which will not be permitted to die, and is alike worthy of its exalted subject and its author:

EULOGY UPON THE LIFE AND PRINCIPLES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

"Over two centuries and a half have passed away since the ruler of any great nation of the world has fallen by the murderous attack of an assassin; and for the first time in our history there is blood on the Presidential chair of our Republic. Death is almost always saddening. The passing away of some dear friend from our earthly sight forever, fills the heart with sorrow. When it strikes down one who fills honorably a position of influence and power, as in the case of our two Presidents who died of disease in the White House, the sincerest grief is felt throughout the land. But when this affliction is aggravated by death coming through the hand of a murderer, it is not strange that the wave of woe sweeps gloomily over a nation, which sits down to mourn in sackcloth, its pulses of business stilled, feeling in every individual heart as if there was one dead at our

own hearth-stones. It seems, too, as if this wicked deed was intensified, in all its horror, by every attendant circumstance. The fatal shot was fired on the very day when the Nation's flag was again unfurled in triumph over that fort in Charleston harbor, which, in four years' time, had been the cradle and the grave of the rebellion. It was at a time when the death of the President could not be of the slightest avail to the treasonable conspiracy against the Republic, which its military leaders acknowledged at last was powerless and overthrown. And it was aimed, alas, with too sure a hand, at the life of that one man in the Government whose heart was tenderest towards the would-be assassins of the Nation's life.

"You may search history, ancient and modern, and when the task is ended, all will concede that Abraham Lincoln was the most merciful ruler who ever put down a powerful rebellion. He had so won the hearts of the people, and so entwined himself in their regard and affection, that he was the only man living who could have stood in the breach between the leaders of this iniquity and the wrath of the country they had plunged into bloody war. Feeling, as so many did, that his kindly heart almost forgot justice in its throbbings for mercy, yet, knowing his unfaltering devotion to his country, his inflexible adherence to principle, his unyielding determination for the restoration of our national unity, there was a trust in him, almost filial in its loving confidence, that whatever he should finally resolve on would prove in the end to be for the best. Had he been an unforgiving ruler; had his daily practice been to sit in his high place, and there administer with unrelenting severity the penalties of offended law; had he proclaimed his resolution to consign all the plotters against his coun