overland stage-coach. That man’s name who ran that line of stages–well,
I declare that name is gone. Well, names will go.
Halliday–ah, that’s the name–Ben Halliday, your uncle [turning to Mr.
Carnegie]. That was the fellow–Ben Halliday–and Jack was full of
admiration at the prodigious speed that that line of stages made–and it
was good speed–one hundred and twenty-five miles a day, going day and
night, and it was the event of Jack’s life, and there at the Fords of the
Jordan the colonel was inspired to a speech (he was always making a
speech), so he called us up to him. He called up five sinners and three
saints. It has been only lately that Mr. Carnegie beatified me. And he
said: “Here are the Fords of the Jordan–a monumental place. At this
very point, when Moses brought the children of Israel through–he brought
the children of Israel from Egypt through the desert you see them–he
guarded them through that desert patiently, patiently during forty years,
and brought them to this spot safe and sound. There you see–there is
the scene of what Moses did.”
And Jack said: “Moses who?”
“Oh,” he says, “Jack, you ought not to ask that! Moses, the great law-
giver! Moses, the great patriot! Moses, the great warrior! Moses, the
great guide, who, as I tell you, brought these people through these three
hundred miles of sand in forty years, and landed there safe and sound.”
Jack said: “There’s nothin’ in that three hundred miles in forty years.
Ben Halliday would have snaked ’em through in thirty–six hours.”
Well, I was speaking of Jack’s innocence, and it was beautiful. Jack was
not ignorant on all subjects. That boy was a deep student in the history
of Anglo-Saxon liberty, and he was a patriot all the way through to the
marrow. There was a subject that interested him all the time. Other
subjects were of no concern to Jack, but that quaint, inscrutable
innocence of his I could not get Williams to put into the picture.
Yes, Williams wanted to do it. He said : “I will make him as innocent as
a virgin.” He thought a moment, and then said, “I will make him as
innocent as an unborn virgin;” which covered the ground.
I was reminded of Jack because I came across a letter to-day which is
over thirty years old that Jack wrote. Jack was doomed to consumption.
He was very long and slim, poor creature; and in a year or two after he
got back from that excursion, to the Holy Land he went on a ride on
horseback through Colorado, and he did not last but a year or two.
He wrote this letter, not to me, but to a friend of mine; and he said:
“I have ridden horseback”–this was three years after–“I hate ridden
horseback four hundred miles through a desert country where you never see
anything but cattle now and then, and now and then a cattle station–ten
miles apart, twenty miles apart. Now you tell Clemens that in all that
stretch of four hundred miles I have seen only two books–the Bible and
‘Innocents Abroad’. Tell Clemens the Bible was in a very good
condition.”
I say that he had studied, and he had, the real Saxon liberty, the
acquirement of our liberty, and Jack used to repeat some verses–I don’t
know where they came from, but I thought of them to-day when I saw that
letter–that that boy could have been talking of himself in those quoted
lines from that unknown poet:
“For he had sat at Sidney’s feet
And walked with him in plain apart,
And through the centuries heard the beat
Of Freedom’s march through Cromwell’s heart.”
And he was that kind of a boy. He should have lived, and yet he should
not have lived, because he died at that early age–he couldn’t have been
more than twenty–he had seen all there was to see in the world that was
worth the trouble of living in it; he had seen all of this world that is
valuable; he had seen all of this world that was illusion, and illusion,
is the only valuable thing in it. He had arrived at that point where