He removed it entirely a week later, and bowed his bared head silently, when a fellow-Whig told him, with moist eyes, that the decisive tidings were brought to the hero as he stood in a social gathering of friends. Mr. Clay—so ran the tale I have never heard contradicted—was called out of the room by the messenger, returning in a few minutes to resume the conversation the summons had interrupted, with unruffled mien and the perfect courtesy that never failed him in public and in private. It was said then that he repeated on that evening, in reply to the expressed sorrow of his companions—if, indeed, it was not said then for the first time—the immortal utterance: “I would rather be right than President!” The inevitable dash of the ludicrous struck across the calamity in the form of my father’s disapproval of the velvet bonnet I would not have exchanged on Saturday for a ducal tiara. I had meant to reserve the appearance of it as a pleasant surprise, and to call his attention to it when I was dressed for church next day. I did not blame him for not noticing it in our rapid tramp up Capitol Street on Saturday. He had weightier matters on his mind. With the honest desire of diverting him from the train of ideas that had darkened his visage for twenty-four hours, I donned the precious head-piece ten minutes before it was time to set out for church, and danced into my mother’s room where he sat reading. Walking up to him, I swept a marvellous courtesy and bolted the query full at him: “How do you like my new bonnet?” He lowered the book and surveyed me with lack-lustre eyes. “Not at all, I am sorry to say.” I fairly staggered back, casting a look of anguished appeal at my mother. Being of my sex, she comprehended it. “Why, father! we think it very pretty,” laying her hand on his shoulder. “And she never had a velvet bonnet before.” I saw the significant tightening of the small fingers, and he must have felt it. But the dull eyes did not lighten, the corners of the mouth did not lift. “As I said, I do not admire it. Nor do I think it becoming.” I turned on my heel, as he might have done, and went to my room. When Mea and I joined our parents in the lower hall, the splendors of the new bonnets were extinguished by thick barege veils. We had not meant to wear them in November. They were indispensable for summer noons. After I had confided my tale of woe to my sister, we hastened to exhume the veils from our trunks and to bind them over our hats. We walked, slow and taciturn, behind our elders for five squares. Then my father turned and beckoned to us. He was actually smiling—a whimsical gleam that had in it something of shame, and much of humor. “Take off those veils!” he said, positively, yet kindly. And, as we hesitated visibly: “I mean what I say! I want to take a good look at those bonnets.”