The three watched the procession winding through the mourning streets.
Every house was draped in funeral black, the passing bell tolled from every
church, and the minute-guns boomed at the City Hall and on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Hamilton regarded the cortege at first with a critical eye. The events
of the past week had wrought in him a great expectation, which he feared
would be disappointed. It needed a long tradition to do fitting honour to
the man who had gone. Had America such a tradition? he asked himself. . . .
The coloured troops marching at the head of the line pleased him. That was
a happy thought. He liked, too, the business-like cavalry and infantry, and
the battered field-pieces. . . . He saw his Chief among the foreign
Ministers, bearing a face of portentous solemnity. . . . But he liked best
the Illinois and Kentucky delegates; he thought the dead President would
have liked them too.
Major Endicott was pointing out the chief figures. There's Grant . . . and
Stanton, looking more cantankerous than ever.
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