Leland Stanford
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HARPER'S WEEKLY. [JANUARY 23, 1864. 60 upon them. You have shut me out from prayer and penitence; you have been a living doom against me. Yet I am dying at last in your arms." While he whispered, the words falling with difficulty and pain from his faltering tongue, there came to me once more a sense of ineffable peace and love brooding over us. By some subtle and finer influence the dying man shared it, and opened his eyes again to meet mine looking down upon him with that mysterious renewal of affection. All the long-known consolations, which had been to us only as a very pleasant song, or as good tidings for others from which we ourselves were shut out, entered into our souls in the hour of their extremest need. The pale evening star, steady but very far away, pointed the beginning of the immeasurable distance that was about to separate us; and from my lips, lying close to his dull ear, there fell, almost unconsciously to myself, the words that had dwelt all day in my heart, "Jesus, the Saviour of men." I descended into the Easter streets from the fatal room, which had been the starting-point of both the murdered man and his murderer, into the boundless eternity. No one knew that I had been there; and without distinct aim or design, only hiding in my bosom the sullied and time-worn paper, I wandered back to the poor alms-house. There, with my face turned to the quiet church-yard, which offered me no refuge, though I longed for it greatly, I lay still and silent through weeks of illness, with the treasured paper in his handwriting lying under my pillow, or held for safety in my feverish hands. Afterward I remember, though vaguely, voyaging over miles of visionless waters, and finding Willie, not a heart-broken exile, but happy in a new home, and renouncing the land of his troubles and mine. But I was restless there, and must return; and returning found that the old empty house, with its death-stained attic, had been pulled down as an accursed dwelling, and not one stone of it remained upon another. Yet for me at every Eastertide it is erected again, and the tragedy of my life is acted out once more. Whatever else I forget, or whatever else my mind refuses to receive, there abides with me ever and ever the memory of my fell, remorseless purpose, and of my cruel hatred, darker in its sin than George Denning's unmeditated crime.
EX-GOVERNOR
STANFORD, OF
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