would tolerate no interference from
any one. He did select the very best men he could find. For
instance, he appointed such men as Justice Brewer, of Kansas;
Justice Brown, of Michigan; Judge Woods, of Indiana; and it was
Harrison who appointed President Taft as a Federal Judge. He was
an exceptionally able President, and gave the country an excellent
administration.

But at the same time he was probably the most unsatisfactory
President we ever had in the White House to those who must necessarily
come into personal contact with him. He was quite a public speaker,
and the story has often been told of him that if he should address
ten thousand men from a public platform, he would make every one
his friend; but that if he should meet each of those ten thousand
men personally, each man would go away his enemy. He lacked the
faculty of treating people in a manner to retain their friendship.
Even Senators and Representatives calling on official business he
would treat with scant courtesy. He scarcely ever invited any one
to have a chair.

Senator Platt, of Connecticut, asked me one day if I was going to
the White House to dine that evening, stating that he had an
invitation. I told him no, that I had not yet been invited, that
I had never yet during the Harrison administration even been invited
to take a seat in the White House. Some one overheard the remark
and it was published in the newspapers. I visited the White House
shortly afterwards, and I assume that Harrison had seen it because
as soon as he saw me, without a smile on his face or a gleam in
his eye, he hastened to get me a chair, inviting me to be seated.
I declined to sit down, explaining that I was in a hurry, and closed
the business I had come for, and left. Afterwards he invited me
to dinner and treated me with marked consideration.

I have sometimes wondered whether President Harrison's apparent
coldness may not be ascribed to an absorption in his duties that
made him unintentionally neglectful of the little amenities of
polite usage, they never even having occurred to him. Despite his
cold exterior and frigid manner, it may have been he was sympathetic
at heart. When the Tracey homestead was destroyed by fire, which
resulted in the death of several persons, including the daughter,
and finally resulted in the death of Mrs. Tracey, President Harrison
took the family into the White House and did everything a man could
do to relieve their suffe