He was an
ubiquitous person. He would travel all over the State, spending
the day, perhaps, in visiting forty shops and factories in
the neighborhood of Boston; then take a nine or ten o'clock
train at night and go up to Springfield, get in there at two
or three o'clock in the morning, call up out of bed some active
politician and tell him he had come to sleep with him; spend
the night in talking over the matter about which he was anxious
until six or seven o'clock in the morning (I do not believe
he ever slept much, either with anybody or alone), and then,
perhaps, up to Northampton or Greenfield to see some person
whom he called Tom, Dick, or Harry, but who knew the local
feeling there; and after a week or two spent in that way,
never giving his own opinion, talking as if he were all things
to all men, seeming to hesitate and hesitate and falter and
be frightened, so if you had met him and talked with him you
would have said, if you did not know him well, that there
was no more thought, nor more steadiness of purpose, or backbone
in him than in an easterly cloud; but at length, when the
time came, and he had got ready, the easterly cloud seemed
suddenly to have been charged with an electric fire and a
swift and resistless bolt flashed out, and the righteous
judgment of Massachusetts came from his lips.
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