Houston and Wigfall of Texas—Stephen A. Douglas—The Twaddle about Puritans and Cavaliers—Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge I The National Capitol—old men’s fancies fondly turn to thoughts of youth—was picturesque in its personalities if not in its architecture. By no means the least striking of these was General and Senator Sam Houston, of Texas. In his life of adventure truth proved very much stranger than fiction. The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pass no way without attracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to have him pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling his time with his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into various shapes of hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady acquaintances, they usually went away thinking him a queer old man. So inded he was; yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when he chose, altogether the statesman and orator. There united in him the spirits of the troubadour and the spearman. Ivanhoe was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and the prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean flood that stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales to tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer afternoon on the shady side of Willard’s Hotel—the Senate not in session—he might be seen, an admiring group about him, spinning these yarns, mostly of personal experience—rarely if ever repeating himself—and in tone, gesture and grimace reproducing the drolleries of the backwoods, which from boyhood had been his home. He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in the early days of his Texas career a drunkard. “Everybody got drunk,” I once heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as he gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, “and I realized that somebody must get sober and keep sober.” From the hour of that realization, when he “swore off,” to the hour of his death he never touched intoxicants of any sort. He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had been elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in love. The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly educated, a schoolmate of my mother’s elder sister. She was persuaded by her family to throw over an obscure young man whom she preferred, and to marry a young man so eligible and distinguished. He took her to Nashville, the state capital. There were rounds of gayety. Three months passed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the startling rumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young couple had come to a parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her people. The husband had resigned his office and was gone, no one knew where.