Again, he loves best, I am sure, to go out into the country. We often go together. The last time we drove ten miles under the trees along the Wabash and when his quick eye saw a Kentucky cardinal in the woods, he stopped the horse and sat listening to the clear falling notes of this sweet whistler, and when we heard a mocking bird, like a child, he clasped his hands together and was lost as long as the song lasted in worshipful adoration of the wondrous music that stirred the still atmosphere into responsive vibration. After our dinner at a farmhouse we sat on a fallen “naked sycamore” on the “Banks of the Wabash,” and there I saw deeper into the soul of this great comrade and brother. The universality of his vision was revealed and he poured forth, as though inspired, an analysis of world conditions, a forecast of things certain to occur, that made almost the waters in the river stop, listen and applaud. He described with great particularity the Chicago Republican convention (it was before it occurred, sometime in early May), its certainty to be a dull, apathetic, heartless proceeding, and the St. Louis convention marking the disintegration of a great political party,—Bryan’s dying struggle to save the Democracy and the utter impossibility of preventing the coming together of capitalists, powers and influences, the effect upon the minds of the workers, the revelation of the true position of Capital vs. Labor and the tremendous and resistless growth of the Socialist movement. If he had had ten thousand workers before him, he could not have uttered more polished sentences, more words of deep significance, more prophetic epigrams than I heard alone, sitting on the fallen sycamore. But such things are not lost; he has uttered as great things to men who seemed as trees, but some day these same men will move as though a tornadic wind was upon them and then they will remember when and where they heard the first great words that inspired them.
It was near six o’clock when we came home and the toil-stained workers were going in all directions to their cottages, huts, hovels, boat-houses and tents. I shall never forget the look of compassionate understanding that came into his face as he reiterated some of the things he had so eloquently uttered in their behalf to the Wabash sycamore that afternoon, but now his words find open ears and go clear and welcome to hungry hearts. The words of this great comrade are finding lodgment and bearing fruitage, and the time of emancipation is not far off.