It is the strangest and yet the
fittest thing in the jumble of human vicissitudes, that he, out of so
many millions, unlooked for, unselected by any intelligible process that
could be based upon his genuine qualities, unknown to those who chose
him, and unsuspected of what endowments may adapt him for his tremendous
responsibility, should have found the way open for him to fling his lank
personality into the chair of state,--where, I presume, it was his first
impulse to throw his legs on the council-table, and tell the Cabinet
Ministers a story. There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor
the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in
the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him a thousand
times in some village street; so true was he to the aspect of the pattern
American, though with a certain extravagance which, possibly, I
exaggerated still further by the delighted eagerness with which I took it
in. If put to guess his calling and livelihood, I should have taken him
for a country schoolmaster as soon as anything else. He was dressed in a
rusty black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully
that the suit had adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his
figure, and had grown to be an outer skin of the man.
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