The hotel at which he stopped was on the main street, and had a broad porch that extended the full length of the house. This was about eight or ten feet high, projecting out over the sidewalk, and was reached by a stairway at each end. On the following day, the President held a reception on this porch, and there shook hands with all of the people who had assembled to see him, they passing up at one end of the porch and down at the other. On this porch, on this day, was dispelled from the minds of some of his friends every vestige of the slight suspicion which had been produced by vile hired slanderers, that his fierce nature, turbulent spirit and stormy life had sapped his mental powers, judgment and reason, and that he was no longer the real Andrew Jackson of New Orleans, but was surrounded and controlled by designing, unscrupulous scoundrels, who were feeding the vanity of the old man in his dotage on flattery which he was then unable to detect and resist. President Jackson stood on the hotel porch at Jonesboro, and, possibly at the very moment when public speakers and editors in other parts of the country were lamenting(?) the loss of his former “energy of character” and the decay of his mind and judgment, gave to those people the very highest evidence that he was the Andrew Jackson of old: his form, although he was sixty-five years old, was “straight as a gun-barrel,” and his eyes as flashing and his mind as clear as on the night of the fire, or on the day when he left the bench and arrested Russell Bean, in that very town. As his old friends would approach him in their plain and simple garb, with their wives and children,[R] he would call out their names, grasp their hands, put an arm around them, kiss their daughters, compliment their younger children, and tell the wife that the good-looking boys and girls “favored her” more than they did the father. Incidents of his early life would suggest themselves to his mind--a lawsuit, a fox chase, a deer drive or something else--as they came up, and he would refer to it in some way, in the few moments which he could spare to that particular individual. His famous horse-race with Col. Love in Greasy Cove was mentioned; and it came very near bringing down the porch when a kinsman of Col. Love, by the same name, grasped the old hero by the hand and asked him if he had any better race horses at the Hermitage than he had when he lived in that country; to which he promptly and laughingly replied: “Yes, better than either one of us had that day; come over to the Hermitage, and you shall have one.” Such were the scenes and incidents of that memorable day on the hotel porch in the historic old town of Jonesboro.[S]