novel-reading were such a serious matter to him that he was afraid to go and hear the result of the final examinations but remained in his room until a friend came to tell him that he was one of the first five in his class in his average for the entire course. This is the other side of Reed, “the lazy.”

Besides this success, his oration on “The Fear of Death” won the first prize for English composition. It was in delivering it that Mr. Reed felt the first emotions of the orator, when every eye in the audience was riveted upon him, and when the profound silence that prevailed told the deep interest which his words aroused. Of the year’s work which won for him the privilege of delivering it on that Commencement Day, thirty-three years ago, Mr. Reed says that it was the hardest of his life, and the only time he has forced himself up to his full limit for so long a period.

Graduation from college was not by any means the end of the struggle for the young man. Money was still lacking, and to get it he engaged in school-teaching, an occupation which he had already followed during two terms, and in vacation times. He taught at first for twenty dollars a month, “boarding round,” and the highest pay he ever received as a teacher was forty-five dollars a month. His old comrades delight in telling an incident of his school-teaching days. He once found it necessary to chastise a boy who was about his own age, although he had been cautioned against whipping, by the members of the committee of the district, unless he first referred the case to them. But Reed was Reed even in those days. The committee having failed to sustain him in the past, in this instance he decided that some one must be master at school, and that he would be that some one. Accordingly, the refractory young man was thrashed, after an exciting quarter of an hour—a close victory, which one pound more avoirdupois might have decided against the teacher.

Mr. Reed soon gave up school-teaching, 380 and, thinking that a young man would have a better chance out West, he went to California. Judge Wallace, afterwards Chief Justice of California, examined Reed for admission to the bar. It was in ’63, during the civil war, when the Legal Tender Act was much discussed in California, where a gold basis was still maintained, that Wallace, whose office adjoined the one where Reed was studying, happened in one day and said, “Mr. Reed, I understand you want to be admitted to the bar. Have you studied law?” “Yes, sir, I studied law in Maine while teaching.” “Well,” said Wallace, “I have one question to ask. Is the Legal Tender Act constitutional?” “Yes,” said Reed. “You shall be admitted to the bar,” said Wallace. “Tom Bodley [a deputy sheriff, who had legal aspirations] was asked the same question, and he said ‘no.’ We will admit you both, for anybody who can answer off-hand a question like that ought to practise law in this country.”

Reed’s sojourn on the Pacific coast was short. In ’64 he was made Assistant Paymaster in the United States Navy, and served in that capacity until his honorable discharge a year or so after. His admission to practise before the Supreme Court of the State of Maine followed on his return to the East. Cases came to the young lawyer slowly. The first ones were in the minor municipal courts. Gradually he secured a certain run of commercial and admiralty cases which began to yield something tangible in the shape of fees. Yet the goal of success seemed a long way off, when it happened that in one of those minor cases he cross-examined a refractory witness in such a manner as to completely overturn the testimony given, and 381 thereby won the case for his client. The unexpected result was that the witness who had been upset by the young lawyer’s skill conceived a great admiration for him, and became influential in sending him many cases.

That he made his mark in his modest position is shown by the fact that after two years, in 1867, Mr. Reed was nominated for the State Legislature. Judge Nathan Webb, then County Attorney, who had known Reed simply as his opponent in a number of cases, had proposed his name, and, after six ballots, had succeeded in nominating him. The first thing Reed knew about it was when reading the papers the next morning, and his first impulse was to decline. When Webb came in he urged him to accept, saying that a winter’s legislative experience would broaden and be in every respect valuable to him. Mr. Reed accepted, and after serving two terms in the House he was elected to the State Senate. Then he was made Attorney-General and afterwards City Solicitor of Portland, and in 1876 he was for the first time nominated to represent his district in the House of Representatives in Washington.

At the very moment when Reed, escorted by one of his colleagues, took a seat at the first convenient desk, on the day when he began his life as a congressman, Mr. Reed’s massive figure, suggestive of physical strength; the easy and yet not offensive assurance with which he took his seat and glanced with quizzical eye about the chamber; the unaffected way with which he accepted congratulations from the New England members who knew him, and the reputation he had already won as a master of wit and the possessor of a tongue which could be eloquent with sarcasm, all of these things so impressed Mr. S. S. Cox that he turned to Mr. William T. Frye, then a member for Maine, and said: “Well, Frye, I see your State has sent another intellectual and physical giant who is a youngster here.” “Whom do you mean?” asked Frye. “This man Reed, who must be even now cracking a joke, for I see they are all laughing about him.”

But to maintain the reputation which his State had secured for committing its interests to master men, Mr. Reed had a hard task before him. Blaine, who had just passed from the House to the Senate, had made Maine of preëminent influence by reason of his formidable canvass for the presidential nomination. Eugene Hale and Mr. William T. Frye represented in part the State in the House. Hannibal Hamlin was a member of the Senate, and the tradition of the remarkable intellectual achievements of William Pitt Fessenden, so long a senator from Maine, was still so fresh in the minds of many members of Congress that it was common to hear Mr. Fessenden spoken of as perhaps the ablest senator since the days of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. But, unlike the stories that are 382 told of the débuts of many statesmen, Mr. Reed’s first speech was not a failure. On the contrary, it was a success. A success all the more brilliant because won under trying circumstances.

A bill was under consideration to pay the College of William and Mary, in Virginia, damages for the occupancy of its buildings by United States troops during the war. It was one of an almost innumerable class of similar claims in the South, and its payment would have established a precedent that would at that time have opened the door to the appropriation of millions of dollars. It had been put forward as being the most meritorious of these southern war claims, in the hope that the sympathy which could be aroused in behalf of the venerable institution of learning making the claim (it dating back to Washington’s time, and being of a religious and eleemosynary as well as educational character)