and society better than any other American woman, said to her husband:
"Call that man a backwoodsman? He is the finest gentleman I ever met!"

There is another witness--Mr. Buchanan, afterward President--who tells
how he took a distinguished English lady to the White House when
Old Hickory was President; how he went up to the general's private
apartment, where he found him in a ragged _robe-de-chambre_, smoking his
pipe; how, when he intimated that the President might before coming down
slick himself a bit, he received the half-laughing rebuke: "Buchanan,
I once knew a man in Virginia who made himself independently rich
by minding his own business"; how, when he did come down, he was _en
regle_; and finally how, after a half hour of delightful talk, the
English lady as they regained the street broke forth with enthusiasm,
using almost the selfsame words of Mrs. Claiborne: "He is the finest
gentleman I ever met in the whole course of my life."

VI

The Presidential campaign of 1848--and the concurrent return of the
Mexican soldiers--seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the
camp fires of the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee a
debatable, even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic politician on
the Cass and Butler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when
the election went against us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little
mollified when, on his way to Washington, General Taylor grasping
his old comrade, my grandfather, by the hand, called him "Billy," and
paternally stroked my curls.

Though the next winter we passed in Washington I never saw him in
the White House. He died in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard
Fillmore. It is common to speak of Old Rough and Ready as an ignoramus.
I don't think this. He may not have been very courtly, but he was a
gentleman.

Later in life I came to know Millard Fillmore well and to esteem him
highly. Once he told me that Daniel Webster had said to him: "Fillmore,
I like Clay--I like Clay very much--but he rides rough, sir; damned
rough!"

I was fond of going to the Capitol and of playing amateur page in
the House, of which my father had been a member and where he had many
friends, though I was never officially a page. There was in particular
a little old bald-headed gentleman who was good to me and would put his
arm about me and stroll with me across the rotunda to the Library of
Congress and get me books to read. I was not so