me if I had ever seen the
President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before;
but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank
him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as
the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have
given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the
corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his
ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the
indistinguishable person in whose "integrity and abilities he had reposed
such special confidence" as to have appointed him consul for Venice and
the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have
recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them. I
faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that
every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand,
did him a kindness; and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my
past behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to the
water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from
it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and
then went wearily within doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always
remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have
seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.

V.

I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury
Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of
that kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit
that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O'Connor, at the house
of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of the
promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in
the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I
believe he wrote poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt
Whitman's champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already
espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare, then newly
exploited by the poor lady of Bacon's name, who died constant to it in an
insane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as "the fat
peasant of Stratford," and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a
measure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was then
full upon us, and when in the s