first met Calhoun and entered his service as assistant.
It was under him that I finished my studies in law. Meantime, I was his
messenger in very many quests, his source of information in many matters
where he had no time to go into details.

Strange enough had been some of the circumstances in which I found
myself thrust through this relation with a man so intimately connected
for a generation with our public life. Adventures were always to my
liking, and surely I had my share. I knew the frontier marches of
Tennessee and Alabama, the intricacies of politics of Ohio and New York,
mixed as those things were in Tyler's time. I had even been as far west
as the Rockies, of which young Fremont was now beginning to write so
understandingly. For six months I had been in Mississippi and Texas
studying matters and men, and now, just hack from Natchitoches, I felt
that I had earned some little rest.

But there was the fascination of it--that big game of politics. No, I
will call it by its better name of statesmanship, which sometimes it
deserved in those days, as it does not to-day. That was a day of
Warwicks. The nominal rulers did not hold the greatest titles.
Naturally, I knew something of these things, from the nature of my work
in Calhoun's office. I have had insight into documents which never
became public. I have seen treaties made. I have seen the making of
maps go forward. This, indeed, I was in part to see that very night, and
curiously, too.

How the Baroness von Ritz--beautiful adventuress as she was sometimes
credited with being, charming woman as she was elsewhere described,
fascinating and in some part dangerous to any man, as all
admitted--could care to be concerned with this purely political question
of our possible territories, I was not shrewd enough at that moment in
advance to guess; for I had nothing more certain than the rumor she was
England's spy. I bided my time, knowing that ere long the knowledge must
come to me in Calhoun's office even in case I did not first learn more
than Calhoun himself.

Vaguely in my conscience I felt that, after all, my errand was
justified, even though at some cost to my own wishes and my own pride.
The farther I walked in the dark along Pennsylvania Avenue, into which
finally I swung after I had crossed Rock Bridge, the more I realized
that perhaps this big game was worth playing in detail and without
quibble as the master mind should dictate. As he was servant of a
pur