tless, eager eyes, and the thin, impatient lips work nervously, as if
scarcely able to repress the cry which the children of the horse-leech
have uttered since the beginning of time. It is easy to understand this,
when you remember that, at such a season, there gathers here, besides
the legion of politicians and partisans, and the mighty army of
contractors, a vaster host of persons interested in the private bills
submitted to Congress, and of candidates for the numerous places of
preferment which are being vacated and created daily. Before the
smallest of these has lain open for an hour, there will be scores of
shrill claimants wrangling over it, summoned from the four winds of
heaven by the unerring instinct of the Rapacidae.

Every one of any official or political standing can either influence or
dispose of a certain amount of patronage; to such, life must sometimes
be made a heavy burden. Human nature shrinks from the contemplation of
what each successive President must be doomed to undergo. His nerves
ought to be of iron, and his conscience of brass, or a Gold Coast
Governorship might prove a less dangerous dignity. The character best
fitted for the post would be such an one as Gallio, the tranquil cynic
of Antioch.

Marking, and hearing these things, I thoroughly appreciated an anecdote
told me on board the Asia. At Mobile, in 1849, the Philadelphian met
President Polk, then on his way home from Washington, his term having
just expired. He took up office--a cheery, sanguine man, quite as
healthy as the generality of his compatriots at forty-five; he laid it
down--a helpless invalid, shattered in body and mind, past hope of
revival. My informant, who knew him well, was much shocked at the
change, but tried to console the ex-President, by speaking of the
important measures that made his administration one of the most eventful
since that of Washington; hinting that such grave responsibility and
continual excitement might well account for exhaustion and reaction. The
sick man shook his head drearily, and put the implied compliment aside:
he was past such vanities then.

"You're wrong," he said. "It isn't Oregon, or Mexico, or Texas, but the
office-hunters that have brought me--where I am."

In that answer there was the simple solemnity, that attaches to the
lightest words of the dying. Sixty days later the speaker was "sleeping
down in Tennessee," never more to be vexed by the clamor of the
cormorants, or waked by