rles City, as I afterwards gathered from conversation with him, and
had an interest in tobacco transactions at the North which kept him a
large proportion of his time in this city.

"Of his own choice Ralston attended the theatres very frequently, as I
did from professional duty; and the consequence was that we met often,
and sometimes supped together. I liked him, and he seemed to be pleased
with me, though I should be perverting the truth to say that I ever
became very cordial or intimate with him. There was something about the
man which forbade familiarity; though I remember thinking, several
times, that if one only _could_ penetrate beneath the crust made by that
evident pride and haughty reserve, he was a man to be liked to the death
by a man, and loved by a woman with eternal devotion. After a time, and
without my receiving any 'P.P.C.' to say that he was going to leave the
city, he disappeared, and I saw him no more in the street or at any of
his favorite places of amusement.

"Well, I went down to Mount Vernon with a party of friends from
Washington, on board the steamboat George Page. Did you ever know Page
himself, the fat old Washingtonian who invented something about the
circular-saw, and has some kind of a patent-right on all that are made
above a certain number of inches in diameter? No? Well, he is an odd
genius, and I will some day tell you something about him. But I was just
now speaking of the steamboat named after him. The Rebels had her last
year, you remember, using her as a gunboat somewhere up Aquia Creek,
until they got scared and burned her one night,--though she was about as
fit for that purpose as an Indian bark-canoe. The Page was running as an
excursion boat to Mount Vernon, and sometimes going down to Aquia Creek
in connection with the railroad, in the winter and spring of 1858-9. I
was doing some reporting, and a little lobbying, in the Senate, at the
beginning of March, and, as I have said, ran down with a party of
friends to see the Tomb of Washington, curse the neglect that hung over
it like a nightmare, and execrate the meanness which sold off bouquets
from the garden, and canes from the woods, at a quarter each, by the
hands of a pack of dirty slaves, to the hands of a pack of dirtier
curiosity-hunters.

"Going down the river I found no acquaintances on board, outside of my
own party; but when we had made the due inspection, and were returning
in the afternoon, just when we were off