A Senator’s Valor.

It is interesting to read and to study the opinions of different newspapers touching the Hon. John J. Ingalls, senior senator from Kansas. The truth is, that no public man is more generally misunderstood than is Senator Ingalls. By this 180we mean that a vast majority of the writers who have occasion to write about Senator Ingalls, really do not know him at all. Senator Ingalls is, in fact, a tender, gentle, lovable man. He is exceedingly sentimental, as emotional as a woman, as guileless as a child. He loves nature, and to commune with nature’s quiet, subtile influences. Every day he takes long walks in Washington; he is the most tireless pedestrian in Congress; he is acquainted with all the woodland strolls on the Virginia side, and oftentimes his rambles take him far into rural Maryland. There is a peace, a tranquillity, a simplicity about this man’s private life that is as remarkable as it is beautiful; yet, oh, how grievously he is misjudged!

Illustrative of his humane tenderness, a story is told of a characteristic incident of Senator Ingalls’s visit to Colorado some years ago. He undertook to walk from Leadville to Golden, a mighty distance across the mountains. His friends warned him of the dangers that beset travellers of that mountain fastness, but Senator Ingalls laughed them to scorn.

“I have my penknife with me,” he answered. “It will suffice to protect me, I venture.”

Proceeding on his lonely journey, the senator held sweet communion with the giant trees, the gnarled rocks, the tawdry wild-flowers, and the chattering magpies that greeted him from this side and from that; and his soul contemplated 181through his reverential ocular orbs the awful grandeurs of the eternally snow-clad hills that rose beyond these hills, and heard the songs the storm-clouds sang.

Floating placidly, so to speak, upon this pleasant sea of thought, the senator strode along for many a league, until finally, all of a sudden, he distinctly beheld coming down the mountain-road toward him, a monstrous grizzly bear,—an ursine megatherium, whose fur bristled, whose eyes emitted sparks, whose claws rattled, and whose fangs gnashed, as he scuttled along the mountain-road. In Senator Ingalls’s place at that supreme moment, any other man less humane, less tender than he, would have reached instinctively for his penknife, with which to have assailed the shaggy monster, and to have made him pay for his temerity with his life. But not so with Senator Ingalls. “Go thy way, poor devil!” he murmured softly, paraphrasing Uncle Toby. “Go thy way, poor devil. This mountain pathway is wide enough for me and thee!”

And with this humane sentiment, Senator Ingalls crawled into a hollow tree at the roadside, and waited there until the grizzly bear had passed by, and was well on his way toward the bee-hive in a pine-tree near Crazy-Horse Gulch.

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