In addition to personal attendance upon the President-elect, I soon had my hands full of work in examining and briefing the daily mails, which were burdened with letters of recommendation from individuals, committees and delegations of various States, in regard to the cabinet appointments and a few of the more important offices. Mr. Buchanan was also preparing his inaugural address with his usual care and painstaking, and I copied his drafts and recopied them until he had it prepared to his satisfaction. It underwent no alteration after he went to the National Hotel in Washington, except that he there inserted a clause in regard to the question then pending in the Supreme Court, as one that would dispose of a vexed and dangerous topic by the highest judicial authority of the land. When the time came to leave Wheatland for the capital, preliminary to his inauguration, Mr. Buchanan, Miss Lane, Miss Hetty and I drove into Lancaster in his carriage, escorted all the way to the railway station by a great and enthusiastic crowd of Lancaster citizens and personal friends, with a band of music, although it was very early on a bleak winter morning. I remember his modestly remarking upon the vast crowd thus doing reverence to a mortal man. At the station he was met by an ardent personal and political friend, Robert Magraw, then president of the Northern Central Railroad, and received into a special car, built for the occasion, and the windows of which were in colors and represented familiar scenes of and about Wheatland. After receiving ovations all along the way, especially at Baltimore, the President-elect and party arrived safely in Washington. We were somewhat fearful that Mr. Buchanan might be seriously embarrassed during the inaugural ceremonies from the effects of what was then known as the National Hotel disease, a disorder which, from no cause that we could then discover, had attacked nearly every guest at the house, and from the dire effects of which many never wholly recovered. Dr. Foltz, a naval surgeon, whose appointment in the service, many years before, Mr. Buchanan had assisted, was in constant attendance upon him, and I remember that he and I went together to the Capitol in a carriage just behind the one that conveyed the retiring President and the President-elect, and that he had occasion to administer remedies. The inauguration ceremonies, the ball, and the first reception at the White House by the new President, were very largely attended and successful. It happened that they took place during a short era of good feeling among all shades of politics and party, but unhappily an era of peace destined soon to terminate in bitter discord over the Lecompton Constitution, or Kansas question, and by the more disastrous following appeal to the passions of the two great political sections of the North and the South, which so