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cans, the Cubans and the Filipinos, President McKinley showed them that at least this Government respects the rights of the inferior races.

I believe that President McKinley realized that every truly great nation has a great mission to perform. The mission of the Jews was to develop the idea of religion; that of the Greeks, the conception of the beautiful in art; that of the Romans, law; that of the Germans, music; that of the English, commerce; that of the Americans, personal, religious, and political liberty- the grandest mission of them all.

All of us Americans realize the blessings of a republican form of government, but as long as we remained in our shell, so long was it impossible to propagate the idea of political and religious liberty in the world at large. To fulfill this mission, President McKinley realized that it was absolutely necessary for us to pecome a great commercial nation. In his address at the Buffalo Exposition this month, which might be called his farewell speech to the American people, he advocated three great commercial enterprises. These were: First The construction of the Nicaragua Canal. Second-The building of a Pacific cable. ThirdThe construction and support of a merchant marine. The carrying out of each of these vast enterprises will have a great influence on the world. The construction of the Nicaragua Canal will bring the South, the West and the East closer together. It will bring South America closer to us. The laying of the Pacific cable will bring Hawaii, the Philippine Islands and China right to our doors. The construction of a merchant marine will bring the most distant parts of the world under our influences. Every commercial ship that floats on the seas from this country is a messenger of the gospel of political and religious freedom, and will be a teacher that all men are created equals — that all men have inalienable rights.

This world-wide policy of President McKinley at times was severely criticised by men even in his own party. But as time passed, so completely did it command popular support that his successor, President Roosevelt, announced that he will carry it out to the letter.

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This nation of ours has produced many great men - Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, James G. Blaine, James A. Garfield - but three of them rise head and shoulders above all the others. These are Washington, Lincoln and McKinley. Washington, the founder of this nation, ruled over only a few million people, and his influence was chiefly on the United States. Lincoln, the preserver of this nation, ruled over only half of the people. McKinley cemented and made the North and South feel like brothers. He ruled over all America. His influence pervaded every nook and corner of our land. Some say he was not strong-minded. My opinion is that he was the strongest-minded President we ever had. He accomplished his purpose in such a quiet way, yet his policy was one of boldness. It took a strong-minded and courageous man to depart from the old policy of the nation.

Today our nation is bearing his remains to their last resting-place. We do not realize how great a man we are burying. Future generations will speak of him as the typical, ideal American. Where, in all history, can we find a character so beautiful and complete, so nearly perfect that we know not that he had a fault? He was honest; he was industrious; he was magnanimous; he was great in his love for his friends and in his tenderness and love for his wife. We bury him today. but he lives in our hearts, in our national life, and he will live in the world's history as WILLIAM MCKINLEY, the ideal, typical statesman and beloved American.

VITALITY.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up to-morrow. -Beecher.

BY R. L. SANDWICK.

Principal Monterey Schools.

Read by Miss Flora Conover at McKinley memorial services held in Assembly Hall, Pacific Grove, President McKinley spoke here with great feeling to the G. A. R. June last.

Cal., September 19, 1901.

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On the Heights back of Oakland, Cal.

From "American Authors and Their Homes,"

By FRANCIS WHITING HALSEY, Literary Editor New York Times.

To see a poet near at hand, to see him in his own home, is generally matter for disillusion. One recalls that amusing confession by Howells of his first meeting with Charles Warren Stoddard and his deep disappointment that the author of "Chumming With a Savage" should have been so different from his ideal. Even Tennyson, when he growled over Max Müller's mutton chops, showed the feet of clay.

But one who sees Joaquin Miller, the Poet of the Sierras, in his own home on the heights back of Oakland, need not fear any disappointment; for Joaquin is a living embodiment of his poetry. Absolutely unlike, in his work, any other poet of his day and generation, he is equally unlike his brethren in his personal traits and in his home. For years that home, overlooking the Golden Gate, had been his dream, and even as far back as twenty years ago, when he was the literary lion of London for a season and was the favorite of Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and William Morris, he saw as in a vision the place he was to create for a hermitage:

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With a slight poetic license this will serve as an accurate description of the Heights, Joaquin Miller's home, which is about eight miles back of the little village of Fruitvale, a suburb of Oakland. It is reached by the electric cars and a stiff walk of a mile and a half up a winding foot-hill road, much of the way under the pleasant shade of eucalyptus and acacia trees. Before one is the first high ridge of hills, which forms the base of a spur of the coast range of mountains. At every turn of the road superb glimpses of Oakland and of San Francisco Bay are caught, framed in the vivid green foliage of the Australian gum-trees.

When at last the crown of the hill is reached and one stands before the poet's home, a splendid prospect is unrolled, such as may be seen from only a few of the great mountains of California. The elevation is only a few hundred feet, but the spot commands an enormous range. All around are rolling hills, flanked by tawny mountains, fading into the purple-blue of the distant horizon, crowned by Mount Diablo. Below and on clear days, seemingly

only a gunshot away, are Oakland and Alameda and the green marshes and lagoons that form the crescent shore of San Francisco Bay. For fifty miles the eye takes in the superb sweep of this incomparable bay, and then it rests with delight on the distant city of San Francisco, piled high on its hundred hills, its windows flashing back the brilliant sunshine. Beyond, to the right, one looks thru the nearly clasped arms of leaden-colored land — thru the famous Golden Gate -out to the deep, blue Pacific, which has never lost its mystery since Balboa first beheld it,

"Silent upon a peak in Darien."

The contour of hills is such that one seems cut off from the world and left to the fellowship of mountain, sea, and sky. Turning, however, from this great panorama, the poet's home is seen. It consists of several small houses, half hidden among trees and vines and flanked by winding, treeshaded paths, walled up with stones, which reach clear to the summit of the little hills behind. Entering the gateway, one passes over a little bridge which spans a ditch of clear, running water and comes to the poet's own house, a Gothic cottage, with small porch and wide-open door.

A little way up the steep hillside are three other houses, all half concealed in a maze of roses, passion flowers, acacia, climbing ivy, cedar, spruce, pine, and eucalyptus. Regular thickets are here of the Cherokee rose and tangles of La France and other beautiful roses, with the varied greens of the cedar, the olive, and the pine. When Henry Irving and Ellen Terry visited Miller about four years ago, the pathway from the road to the house over which the famous actors walked was covered with the choicest of roses. Thru all this shrubbery run ditches with life-giving water, that water which, with the California sunshine, like that of Palestine, makes a desert blossom as the rose. Miller did not have the desert to transform, but he did have a high, dry, rocky hillside. He has converted it into a little paradise of rich blooms and sweet odors. Welcome as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land is the sight of this flower-garden, set in the brown bosom of the hills. More than a dozen springs have been developed, and by means of pipes and ditches the poet has fountains and fish-ponds at his very door.

It was a hot afternoon when the writer climbed the road to the Heights, and, entering the Gothic cottage, found the poet enjoying the coolness of an adjoining room, upon the roof of which an artificial shower was descending. The poet was seated on a pallet in the corner. In his usual afternoon garb, he was as picturesque as his surroundings.

Imagine a man of tall, athletic build, with fine, dome-shaped brow; long, tawny hair streaked with gray; a tangle of yellow mustache and beard; a strong, large nose, sunburned like his cheeks, and clear, flashing, gray-blue eyes that look out from under heavy, bushy eyebrows with the quickness and the eagerness of a boy's. Something there is of the scout and the plainsman in the eyes, face, and movements. He looks as one fancies Kit Carson looked when he guided Frémont the Pathfinder thru the hostile Indian country out to the Western sea. Miller was dressed in a corduroy coat, trousers in boots, pongee shirt, with loose Japanese silk neck-scarf, and broad sombrero.

whole appearance of the man suggested his revolt against any restraint of costume, just as his talk suggests his warfare on conventionality and his delight in what is free and spontaneous in nature and life.

The poet's workroom is the main apartment of the Gothic cottage. The sun streams in thru the open door. The walls are ceiled with the California redwood, unstained and without touch of shellac or oil. On the bare floor are a few fine skins, and on the bed in the corner are other robes. The remainder of the furniture consists of a bureau, with a wide-open top drawer, mainly used as a receptacle for "copy," and a couple of chairs. On the walls are many photographs of famous men - Tennyson, Browning, Morris, Sir Walter Besant, Garibaldi, Napoleon, and many others, with some ideal heads from the English weekly papers. On the bureau is a glass with some beautiful roses.

Miller works wholly in bed. When he wakes in the morning he has his coffee. Then he makes a bolster of his pillows, gets out a large manila pad, and goes to work. He usually writes in pencil, in big hieroglyphics, which only those trained to the peculiarities of his penmanship can decipher. These sheets are afterwards typewritten. He waits for this transcript before making any corrections. As a rule, he works steadily till noon. Then he dresses, has lunch with his family, and devotes the remainder of the day to labor or recreation out of doors.

With Miller the gift of song came by nature; it has never been developed by art. The lyric faculty, which one of our best critics declares that he has in greater measure than any American poet except Poe, he uses with the same freedom that a great singer uses his voice. Words come to him without effort, and language becomes plastic under his hand as it has only been in this age under the hands of Tennyson and Swinburne.

His best work breathes his love for the mountains and the forests of the Sierras, the home of his boyhood; and these songs, which make the exiled Californian homesick, were written while he was in Europe. In him also is a great longing to reproduce the splendid courage and the spiritual power of the early navigators - Magellan, Drake, Vancouver, Hawkins, and all that noble crew half adventurers and half pirates-who solved the mystery of the unknown Pacific. He believes that here is the field for the future poet and romance writer, rather than in the past of the Old World, which has been dug over until all its freshness is gone.

Joaquin does not care to talk of the work he has done. He looks forward to greater and finer work in the future. His noblest poems have been written within five years. One is on the death of Tennyson, the other on Columbus. Either would serve to assure fame for a poet. On returning from Alaska two years ago he long felt the physical effects of the enormous strain of life under the Arctic Circle, but his mind eventually became clearer and stronger, and his impressions took shape.

When he talks of the scenery of the Far North his eye lights up with enthusiasm. "My old loyalty to the Sierras," he says, "is gone. Those Northern mountains dwarf our Shasta and our Yosemite. No words can describe their grandeur; it weighs on the soul. Clothed in perpetual snow,

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