actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated
and took some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General
Banks and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress,
and he did not recall me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless I
warmed to him, and when during Cleveland's first term he came to me with
a hard-luck story I was glad to throw myself into the breach. He had
been a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and a Governor of
Massachusetts, but was a faded old man, very commonplace, and except for
the little post he held under Government pitiably helpless.

Colonel George Walton was one of my father's intimates and an imposing
and familiar figure about Washington. He was the son of a signer of the
Declaration of Independence, a distinction in those days, had been mayor
of Mobile and was an unending raconteur. To my childish mind he appeared
to know everything that ever had been or ever would be. He would tell me
stories by the hour and send me to buy him lottery tickets. I afterward
learned that that form of gambling was his mania. I also learned that
many of his stories were apocryphal or very highly colored.

One of these stories especially took me. It related how when he was on
a yachting cruise in the Gulf of Mexico the boat was overhauled by
pirates, and how he being the likeliest of the company was tied up and
whipped to make him disgorge, or tell where the treasure was.

"Colonel Walton," said I, "did the whipping hurt you much?"

"Sir," he replied, as if I were a grown-up, "they whipped me until I was
perfectly disgusted."

An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard me mention
Colonel Walton--a most distinguished, religious old lady--and said to
me, "Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villain
or confess that you ever knew him," proceeding to give me his awful,
blood-curdling history.

It was mainly a figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it
to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then
living--I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was
then three score and ten--and he cried, "That old hag! Good Lord! Don't
they ever die!"

Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country,
and with many of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy
intercourse of hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have acquired
for official station. Familiarity may not alw