he
would be a pliant tool--an automaton, to dance to their wire-pulling.
How little they understood him, and how well he understood them! At
once he let them know he was President, and was determined to take the
responsibility of administering the Government in the true spirit of
its institutions. The alarm, which pervaded all political circles so
soon as this was understood, is remembered well. It was a bomb exploded
under the mess-table, scattering the mess and breaking to fragments all
their cunningly devised machinations for rule and preferment--an open
declaration of war against all cliques and all dictation. His inaugural
was startling, and his first message explicit. His policy was avowed,
and though it gathered about him a storm, he nobly breasted it, and
rode it out triumphantly. His administration closed in a blaze of
glory. He retired the most popular and most powerful man the nation had
ever seen.

CHAPTER XII.

GOSSIP.

UNREQUITED LOVE--POPPING THE QUESTION--PRACTICAL JOKING--SATAN LET
LOOSE--RHEA, BUT NOT RHEA--TEACHINGS OF NATURE--H.S. SMITH.

This must be a gossiping chapter, of many persons and many things,
running through many years.

I love to dwell upon the years of youth. They are the sweetest in life;
and these memories constitute most of the happiness of declining life.
Incidents in our pilgrimage awaken the almost forgotten, and then how
many, many memories flit through the mind, and what a melancholy
pleasure fills the soul! We think, and think on, calling this and that
memory up from the grave of forgetfulness, until all the past seems
present, and we live over the bliss of boyhood with a mimic ecstasy of
young life and its gladdening joys.

Like every young man, I suppose, I loved a fair girl with beautiful
blue eyes, and lips so pouting and plump, so ruddy and liquid, that the
words seemed sweetened as they melted away from them; but my love was
unpropitious, and another was preferred to me. I have ever been curious
to know why. Vanity always in my own soul made me greatly the superior
of the favored one, in all particulars. But she did not think so, and
chose as she liked. I saw her but once a bride. I went away, and found,
as others do, another and dearer love. Sitting on my horse by her side,
as she held in her beautiful palfrey, upon the summit of a cliff, which
rises grandly above, and brows the drab waters of the great
Mississippi, she pointed to the river, which resembl