For her to gain an interview with President Lincoln was comparatively easy, for one member of the President’s Cabinet, Mr. Salmon P. Chase, now Secretary of the Treasury, was an old Ohio friend of hers. Years back, in Cincinnati, he had been a member of the Semi-colon Club. It was natural that this former friend should now find it easy to arrange for Mrs. Stowe to call upon President Lincoln and to have a quiet conversation with him. Her son, Charles Edward, twelve years old, who still remembers the distinguished event of that day as though it had happened yesterday, and her grown-up daughter, Harriet, accompanied her. It was a wonderful experience for them. The White House with its Ionic pillars seemed to young Charles a palace of dreamland; as they passed through the halls and caught a glimpse through an open door of the wonderful East Room where the carpet, selected for that room by Mrs. Lincoln, was of a pale green tapestry worked with flowers, it must have seemed to him that the gleaming transparent waves of the ocean were tossing roses to his feet. They were conducted up a staircase and taken to the President’s reception parlor, then called the Red Room, where the interview was to be held. Though the room was richly furnished, it seemed like a quiet and cozy place to the little boy. Perhaps this was because it was a dark chilly day and there was a bright wood fire burning in the fireplace. The President was sitting before the fire as they entered. His gaunt figure was bowed in a melancholy attitude, and he was warming his hands by turning them first the palms toward the flame and then the backs, seemingly just for the sheer enjoyment of the genial warmth. Overcome by a natural feeling of reverence for the great man into whose presence they were being ushered, Mrs. Stowe and her little group held back for a moment and waited; but Mr. Chase led them forward and told the President that he had brought Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe to visit him. With that awkwardness which is one of our most appealing memories of him, Mr. Lincoln rose quickly from his chair, revealing his whole six feet and four inches of height, and came forward eagerly. “Why, Mrs. Stowe,” he exclaimed, holding out his hand, “I’m right glad to see you!” Leading her to a chair, he added with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” With this pleasantry they sat down together before the fire.