picked me
up, and I was employed in addition to my not very arduous duties on the
States to write occasional letters from Washington to the Philadelphia
Press. Good fortune like ill fortune rarely comes singly. Without
anybody's interposition I was appointed to a clerkship, a real
"sinecure," in the Interior Department by Jacob Thompson, the secretary,
my father's old colleague in Congress. When the troubles of 1860-61 rose
I was literally doing "a land-office business," with money galore and to
spare. Somehow, I don't know how, I contrived to spend it, though I
had no vices, and worked like a hired man upon my literary hopes and
newspaper obligations.

Life in Washington under these conditions was delightful. I did not know
how my heart was wrapped up in it until I had to part from it. My father
stood high in public esteem. My mother was a leader in society. All
doors were open to me. I had many friends. Going back to Tennessee in
the midsummer of 1861, via Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, there happened a
railway break and a halt of several hours at a village on the Ohio.
I strolled down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost
despairing--nigh heartbroken--when I began to feel an irresistible
fascination about the swift-flowing stream. I leaped to my feet and ran
away; and that is the only thought of suicide that I can recall.

IV

Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, in her "Belle of the Fifties" has given a graphic
picture of life in the national capital during the administrations of
Pierce and Buchanan. The South was very much in the saddle. Pierce, as
I have said, was Southern in temperament, and Buchanan, who to those he
did not like or approve had, as Arnold Harris said, "a winning way of
making himself hateful," was an aristocrat under Southern and feminine
influence.

I was fond of Mr. Pierce, but I could never endure Mr. Buchanan. His
very voice gave offense to me. Directed by a periodical publication to
make a sketch of him to accompany an engraving, I did my best on it.

Jacob Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, said to me: "Now, Henry,
here's your chance for a foreign appointment."

I now know that my writing was clumsy enough and my attempt to play
the courtier clumsier still. Nevertheless, as a friend of my father and
mother "Old Buck" might have been a little more considerate than he was
with a lad trying to please and do him honor. I came away from the White
House my _amour propre_ wounded, an