Officials Back from Buffalo

Secretary Gage and Attorney General Knox Talk Confidently.

     Secretary Gage, who returned from Buffalo yesterday morning, said that the condition of the President when he met him last was most encouraging.
     “I have very little anxiety about the final outcome,” Mr. Gage continued. “No, I haven’t any anxiety. In the case of an ordinary patient the physicians would probably have said positively twenty-four hours ago that all danger was passed. Of course, I should feel easier if the President was on his feet, entirely well; but I have no doubt that his recovery is assured as positively as anything can be assured in this world.”
     Attorney General Knox, who returned from Buffalo Monday night, was at his desk in the Department of Justic[e] yesterday morning. The Attorney General reports the President in excellent spirits and confident of his speedy recovery. The case, Mr. Knox is assured, is progressing favorably.
     The President’s anticipation of his early recovery, Mr. Knox said, was not only expressed in words directly to that effect, but was to be inferred from the plans Mr. McKinley was already evolving for the time when he would be entirely convalescent. The President, said the Attorney General, talked of his return to the Capital at no late date, and proposed the closing up of his home and the ending of the executive business at Canton.
     J. H. Brigham, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, returned to this city from Buffalo yesterday, and said regarding the condition of Mr. McKinley that Secretaries Root, Gage, Hitchcock, and Wilson, who were with the President, believed the President would get well and that they felt so good about it that they could hardly find words to express their joy. Mr. Brigham, in recommending a safeguard against similar cases, said that every man ought to show both hands when he approaches the President, and that some one should be present at every reception to shake the hand of every one before he reaches the President.