All this had been arranged for him while he was away on the mission of averting disaster in Cuba, and when he returned to Washington he had just time, as he expressed it, “to pack the War Department into a suitcase” before he was off on a speechmaking trip which took him from Baltimore through Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming and Idaho and back through Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Orleans to Washington, with only such time for preparation of speeches as he could get on the trains between stops.

His letters to me were dictated to his stenographer, and in rereading them I get the impression that I was made the victim of his thinking processes since he poured into them all the politics and the turmoil of the hour, together with lengthy comments which kept me very much alive with interest in the campaign in which he was engaged.

About this time there appeared in the New York Sun an editorial which pleased me and which expressed the rush of our lives with singular vividness. It said in part: