and other prominent men, each one in numbers and
guests almost a repetition of the other. Mr. Van Buren was at all
of them, shaking hands with everybody, glad to see everybody, asking
about everybody's friends, and trusting that everybody was well.
Colonel Richard M. Johnson was also to be seen at all public
gatherings, looking, in his scarlet waistcoat and ill-fitting coat,
not as the killer of Tecumseh, but as the veritable Tecumseh himself.
Mr. Webster was seldom seen at public parties, but Messrs. Clay
and Calhoun were generally present, with the foreign Ministers and
their suites, who were the only wearers of mustaches in those days.
There were the magnates of the Senate and the House, each one great
in his own estimation, with the _chevaliers a'industrie_, who lived
as by their wits, upon long credits and new debts, and there were
strangers congregated from all sections of the country, some having
business before Congress, and others having come to see how the
country was governed. Every one, on his arrival, would take a
carriage and leave cards for the heads of departments, foreign
Ministers, leading army and navy officers, and prominent members
of Congress. This would bring in return the cards of these magnates
and invitations to their next party.

Mr. Clay was a good _raconteur_, and always had a story to illustrate
his opinions advanced in conversation. One day, when he had been
complimented on his neat, precise handwriting, always free from
blots, interlineations, and erasures, he spoke about the importance
of writing legibly, and told an amusing story about a Cincinnati
grocery-man, who, finding the market short of cranberries, and
under the impression that the fruit could be purchased cheaply at
a little town in Kentucky, wrote to a customer there acquainting
him with the fact and requesting him to send "one hundred bushels
per Simmons" (the wagoner usually sent). The correspondent, a
plain, uneducated man, had considerable difficulty in deciphering
the fashionable scrawl common with merchants' clerks of late years,
and the most important word, "cranberries," he failed to make out,
but he did plainly and clearly read--one hundred bushels persimmons.
As the article was growing all around him, all the boys in the
neighborhood were set to gathering it, and the wagoner made his
appearance in due time in Cincinnati with eighty bushels, all that
the wagon body would hold, and a line from the country mercha