Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 June 1889 — BEN BUTLER AT SEVENTY. [ARTICLE]

BEN BUTLER AT SEVENTY.

An Interesting "Pen Picture of the Great Buliaoser in Bis Old Age. I Philadelphia Record's Washington Letter. 4t seventy years of, age Butler is a stout, puffy person, whose unsymmetrieal figure, especially when he is standing, strangely reminds you of the late Henry Ward Beecher’s. Somehow his way of standing up is almost exactly like Beecher’s. His head is like Benjtrain Franklin’s, for whom he was named, as Franklin’s head looks in the conventiOnal portrait. It is large, long and broad, and bald from front to back on top, while a thick curtain of gray hair falls all around it, mingling at the sides with thin gray whiskers, which do not appear in any picture of Butler that I have ever seen. His face looks elephantine, It is in the wrinkles and puffed flesh around his eyes for all the world like an elephant's. When he laughs thißfl.eah cloßefrin all over~ both his" eyes and all his wrinkles come together in a most extraordinary fashion. He does not seem cross-eyed until you look directly at him, but his eyes are set obliquely in his head, although they aie just the opposite angle to a Chinaman’s—higher at the nose than on the outer sides. He has two plates of false teeth and they do not stick very well, so that when he talks, they are very apt to fall together suddenly and cut every other word in two. Most of the time he is chewing a bit of white spruce gum, which he carries in an old fashioned jewelled snuff box when it is not. in his mouth. His face is one of the most mobile and under his direction one of the most interesting that I ever saw. His skin, wrinkled more from quantity than from quality, is easily worked into the most varying expressions, and he uses it constantly. Now he opens his great eyelids wide apart, brings his head up suddenly, puffs out his lips, and therefore his thin little gray mustache, which plays so small a part amid the wrinkles, and looks’out aUyoil from a frowning beetling fortress. Again, he wrinkles all his face into a smile, makes his eyes small, tucks in his lips and looks very mild aad agreeable, or he takes up a book, holds it lovingly to his bread, bends his eyes closely to it (he wears no glasses or spectacles of any kind) and drinks it in. . But his laugh, a deep, dangerous chuckle, followed by an internal convulsion, is most startling of ail. Butler is a great many men in one, and one of them is an actor. He would have made a great comedian. As it is he finds his hisironic talent very useful and exercises it all the time. Butler is always the lawyer whenever he is in his office, however sociable and companionable he is elsewhere. At his desk he is always alert, oh guard, watchful of chances. He locks much younger than he is for this reason. But it is his vigorous thinking and his still more vigorous talking which make him seem a comparatively young man. He has a marvellous memory. He can remember apparently almost anything which he has seen or heard or read, and is seldom ata loss for a date or a name. His perceptions are very quick and comprehensive, and he has one of the quickest tongues, in spite of the false teeth and the chewing gum, that I ever heard— a rough tongue, too. The half that he says about his enemies for publication is nothing to the half he* says about them privately. He likes to be called a good hater. He enjoys a fight, and every damaging fact and every criminating admission is rolled like his chewing gum under his tongue. Butler dresses well. He usually wears a silk-faced frock coat with a boutonniere, always of several flowers, in his button-hole. He wears a heavy gold watch chain, with a pilot’s wheel for a charm, heavy gold cuff buttons. In his office here he is very apt to wear thick carpet slippers, for it is connected by a passage-way with the house where he lives while in Washington as the guest of his niece, although he owns the house. It is the middle one o* the three built of Gape Ann granite opposite the Capitol, which are generally lumped together, and pointed out to tourists as “Ben But)er’s house.” He wants to sell them to the Government for $250,000 more or less, to be used as committee and store rooms for Congress, but so far has not been able to get the money out of Congress. The southernmost house is, however, rented by the Coast Survey, whose building, it adjoins, for storage put poses, and the northernmost is partially rented by Coneress for committee rooms. ILwm in thiahouse, then rented by Senator Jones, of Nevada, that President Arthur carried on the Government when he first came here after the death of Garfield. The houses are handsome. Butler’s office is very plain. It is in a small rough brick toil ling just back of the middle house, and it is divided into two rooms, which are nncarpeted, have no Wall decorations except a clock, and no furniture except the absolutely necessary desks and well-filled bookcases, all of the very plainest description. O. D. Barrett, a white-haired lawyer, who represents Butler ip Washington, and a young man with gold-rimmqd spectacles who manipulates the typewriter very rapidly, are his companions in the office, while his intelligent contraband or body servant waits in the passage without.