ve found you out?"

"No, I scarcely think so."

"Then I will see that they do," and he proceeded in his peculiarly
subtle way to undo all that we had done, prolonging the session
twenty-four hours.

He was an able man and a lovable man. The missing ingredient was
serious belief. Just after the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane
Presidential ticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra-Southern speech
from Mr. Breckinridge's doorway. "What do you think of that?" I asked
Andrew Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an
oath: "I never like a man to be for me more than I am for myself." I
have been told that even at home General Butler could never acquire the
public confidence. In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he
gave the impression of being something of an intellectual sharper.

He was charitable, generous and amiable. The famous New Orleans order
which had made him odious to the women of the South he had issued to
warn bad women and protect good women. Assuredly he did not foresee the
interpretation that would be put upon it. He was personally popular in
Congress. When he came to Washington he dispensed a lavish hospitality.
Such radical Democrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his company,
became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious to relate, a Kentucky
Congressman of the period lost his seat because it was charged and
proven that he had ridden in a carriage to the White House with the
Yankee Boanerges on a public occasion.

III

Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen
too much. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to
think that there was a principle involved between the dogmas of
Free Trade and Protection as they were preached by their respective
attorneys. Yet what was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme--

--"_The good old role--the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power
And they should keep who can_."

How little wisdom one man may get from another man's counsels, one
nation may get from another nation's history, can be partly computed
when we reflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning
admonition.

Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life.
Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative,
the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic of
events, but the common law of the inevitable