Deep Sorrow for Dead President

Whole City Is in Mourning for the Departed President. Scenes at Milburn House.

     NEVER a more beautiful morning dawned upon the city of Buffalo than this, yet never has the city suffered such a sense of profound affliction. Elsewhere in the nation and all over the civilized world there is mourning for the man, the statesman, the ruler who has passed away. But he came to this city as its guest and was stricken down in the midst of festivities in his honor when the people were crowding around him by the thousands to show their pride in him and their affection for the highly honored and most widely beloved man of our time.
     Buffalo then feels this calamity as a personal experience and takes it home in a way that hardly any other community in the land can do. And this feeling of sorrow is universal. It is not confined to any class or condition of men, nor bounded by political or social lines. Mr. McKinley had become recognized as the President of the whole people long before the bullet of the assassin laid him low.
     He had reached the summit of earthly ambition for an American and was sincerely trying with all his immense ability and unrivaled experience and profoundly patriotic spirit to serve the nation that had called him to administer its affairs. He had succeeded to a degree that gave him rank with Washington and Lincoln among the greatest three of all our Presidents.
     And besides his eminence as a statesman, Mr. McKinley was as greatly admired as a man in the ways of private citizenship, in devotion to his own household and kin and in the social accomplishments of the ideal gentleman.
     These things are understood and appreciated nearly everywhere, but the loss of the President in the circumstances has filled Buffalo with a sense of special sorrow that can be estimated only by mingling with the people and listening to their laments.