With a large wad of civil service wedged in among your back teeth, a larger fragment, perhaps, than you were prepared to masticate when you bit it off; with an agonized southern democracy and a clamorous northern constituency; with disappointment poorly concealed among your friends and hilarity openly expressed by your enemies; with the snarl of the vanquished Mr. Davis, who was at one time a sort of president himself, as he rolls up future majorities for your foes; with a lot of sharp-witted journalists walking all over you every twenty-four hours and climbing up your stalwart frame with their telegraph repair boots on, I am surprised, Grover, honestly, as between man and man, that you should have tried to add housekeeping to all this other agony. Had you been young and tender under the wings I might have understood it, but you must admit, in the quiet and sanctity of your own home, Grover, that you are no gosling. You have arrived at man's estate. You have climbed the barbed-wire fence which separates the fluff and bloom and blossom and bumble-bees of impetuous youth from the yellow fields and shadowy orchards of middle life. You now stand in the full glare of life's meridian. You are entering upon a new experience. Possibly you think that because you are president the annoyances peculiar to the life of a new, green groom will not reach you. Do not fool yourself in this manner. Others have made the same mistake. Position, wealth and fame cannot shut out the awkward and trying circumstances which attend the married man even as the sparks are prone to fly upward. It will seem odd to you at first, Mr. President, after the affairs of the nation have been put aside for the day and the government fire proof safe locked up for the night, to go up to your boudoir and converse with a bride, with one corner of her mouth full of pins. A man may write a pretty fair message to congress, one that will be accepted and printed all over the country, and yet he may not be fitted to hold a conversation with one corner of a woman's mouth while the other is filled with pins. To some men it is given to be great as statesmen, while to others it is given to be fluent conversationalists under these circumstances.