After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter
one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest
trace of indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intent
of the constitution was, usage had made the presidential electors
strictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that for him
to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes would
have-been an act of bad faith.
He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before
the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little
estrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much
in such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge
environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice
him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. I
imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but
vital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and
left him heart-loose as he had not been before.
I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes
that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the
minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for
myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very
early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a
diplomatic mission.
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