There is another witness--Mr. Buchanan, afterward President--who tells how he took a distinguished English lady to the White House when Old Hickory was President; how he went up to the general's private apartment, where he found him in a ragged _robe-de-chambre_, smoking his pipe; how, when he intimated that the President might before coming down slick himself a bit, he received the half-laughing rebuke: "Buchanan, I once knew a man in Virginia who made himself independently rich by minding his own business"; how, when he did come down, he was _en règle_; and finally how, after a half hour of delightful talk, the English lady as they regained the street broke forth with enthusiasm, using almost the selfsame words of Mrs. Claiborne: "He is the finest gentleman I ever met in the whole course of my life." VI The Presidential campaign of 1848--and the concurrent return of the Mexican soldiers--seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the camp fires of the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee a debatable, even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic politician on the Cass and Butler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when the election went against us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little mollified when, on his way to Washington, General Taylor grasping his old comrade, my grandfather, by the hand, called him "Billy," and paternally stroked my curls. Though the next winter we passed in Washington I never saw him in the White House. He died in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard Fillmore. It is common to speak of Old Rough and Ready as an ignoramus. I don't think this. He may not have been very courtly, but he was a gentleman. Later in life I came to know Millard Fillmore well and to esteem him highly. Once he told me that Daniel Webster had said to him: "Fillmore, I like Clay--I like Clay very much--but he rides rough, sir; damned rough!" I was fond of going to the Capitol and of playing amateur page in the House, of which my father had been a member and where he had many friends, though I was never officially a page. There was in particular a little old bald-headed gentleman who was good to me and would put his arm about me and stroll with me across the rotunda to the Library of Congress and get me books to read. I was not so young as not to know that he was an ex-President of the United States, and to realize the meaning of it. He had been the oldest member of the House when my father was the youngest. He was John Quincy Adams. By chance I was on the floor of the House when he fell in his place, and followed the excited and tearful throng when they bore him into the Speaker's Room, kneeling by the side of the sofa with an improvised fan and crying as if my heart would break.