I said to him that in a contingency not difficult to imagine there might be two persons claiming a title to the White House on the 4th of March, one by the choice of the Senate, another by the choice of the House of Representatives, and that it would interest Governor Tilden very much to know whether General Grant would think it his duty to solve that problem with the sword, or leave it to the solution of time and events. Corbin replied that he would tell me what must not go beyond me and Governor Tilden. Some time ago, he said, Grant sent a number of boxes to his house at Elizabeth for safe-keeping, and in stating his intention to do so, he observed that as the inauguration would occur on Sunday at 12 M. he proposed to vacate the White House Saturday night; whoever, therefore, said Corbin, gets into it first will have a very substantial advantage. The President might perhaps stay in until the following day if sufficient reason were shown for so doing. But, said I, suppose our candidate gets the White House and the other gets the Capitol, what then? Corbin paused a little, and then said: "The keeper of the Capitol is under the control of the Commissioner of Public Buildings. The Commissioner of Public Buildings is an engineer officer, under the orders of Chief-Engineer Humphreys. The present Commissioner of Public Buildings is Babcock; like St. Paul, he is generally believed to have an eye 'to the recompense of reward.' Then, those Irish doorkeepers may be worth looking to." Such was the substance of an interview which occupied about two hours. What may have prompted Corbin to take the trouble to come all the way from Washington to give me this hint, beyond a desire to give himself importance in the eyes of Mr. Tilden, and how far President Grant countenanced his mission, if he knew anything about it, are questions which I never troubled myself to solve. There is no doubt that President Grant thought Tilden had been elected, and found no satisfaction in the prospect of having Hayes for his successor; but if he had wished to convey to Mr. Tilden any intimation that he would find the White House vacant and ready for his occupation on the night of the 3d of March, I find it difficult to believe that he would have selected Corbin for his emissary. However that may be, neither Mr. Tilden nor myself thought his communication worthy of serious consideration. On the second day of March the House of Representatives, by a vote of 137 to 88, adopted the preamble and resolutions which follow, declaring that Samuel J. Tilden had been duly elected President, and Thomas A. Hendricks duly elected Vice-President of the United States. If these 137 votes in favor of Tilden and Hendricks represented the requisite constitutional number of States in the Union, it is not easy to see what more was necessary to make the one President and the other Vice-President two days later than simply to take the oaths of office prescribed by the Constitution.