t frame with their telegraph repair boots
on, I am surprised, Grover, honestly, as between man and man, that you
should have tried to add housekeeping to all this other agony. Had you
been young and tender under the wings I might have understood it, but
you must admit, in the quiet and sanctity of your own home, Grover, that
you are no gosling. You have arrived at man's estate. You have climbed
the barbed-wire fence which separates the fluff and bloom and blossom
and bumble-bees of impetuous youth from the yellow fields and shadowy
orchards of middle life. You now stand in the full glare of life's
meridian. You are entering upon a new experience. Possibly you think
that because you are president the annoyances peculiar to the life of a
new, green groom will not reach you. Do not fool yourself in this
manner. Others have made the same mistake. Position, wealth and fame
cannot shut out the awkward and trying circumstances which attend the
married man even as the sparks are prone to fly upward.

It will seem odd to you at first, Mr. President, after the affairs of
the nation have been put aside for the day and the government fire proof
safe locked up for the night, to go up to your boudoir and converse with
a bride, with one corner of her mouth full of pins. A man may write a
pretty fair message to congress, one that will be accepted and printed
all over the country, and yet he may not be fitted to hold a
conversation with one corner of a woman's mouth while the other is
filled with pins. To some men it is given to be great as statesmen,
while to others it is given to be fluent conversationalists under these
circumstances.

Mr. President, I may be taking a great liberty in writing to you and
touching upon your private affairs, but I noticed that everybody else
was doing it and so I have nerved myself up to write you, having once
been a married man myself, though not, as I said, under the same
circumstances. When I was married I was only a plain justice of the
peace, plodding quietly along and striving to do my duty. You was then
sheriff of your county. Little did we think in those days that now you
would be a freshly married president and I the author of several pieces
which have been printed in the papers. Little did we think then, when I
was a justice of the peace in Wyoming and you a sheriff in New York,
that to-day your timothy lawn would be kicked all to pieces by your
admiring constituents, while I would be known an