Not long after my return to Washington Col. John W. Forney picked me up, and I was employed in addition to my not very arduous duties on the States to write occasional letters from Washington to the Philadelphia Press. Good fortune like ill fortune rarely comes singly. Without anybody's interposition I was appointed to a clerkship, a real "sinecure," in the Interior Department by Jacob Thompson, the secretary, my father's old colleague in Congress. When the troubles of 1860-61 rose I was literally doing "a land-office business," with money galore and to spare. Somehow, I don't know how, I contrived to spend it, though I had no vices, and worked like a hired man upon my literary hopes and newspaper obligations. Life in Washington under these conditions was delightful. I did not know how my heart was wrapped up in it until I had to part from it. My father stood high in public esteem. My mother was a leader in society. All doors were open to me. I had many friends. Going back to Tennessee in the midsummer of 1861, via Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, there happened a railway break and a halt of several hours at a village on the Ohio. I strolled down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost despairing--nigh heartbroken--when I began to feel an irresistible fascination about the swift-flowing stream. I leaped to my feet and ran away; and that is the only thought of suicide that I can recall. IV Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, in her "Belle of the Fifties" has given a graphic picture of life in the national capital during the administrations of Pierce and Buchanan. The South was very much in the saddle. Pierce, as I have said, was Southern in temperament, and Buchanan, who to those he did not like or approve had, as Arnold Harris said, "a winning way of making himself hateful," was an aristocrat under Southern and feminine influence. I was fond of Mr. Pierce, but I could never endure Mr. Buchanan. His very voice gave offense to me. Directed by a periodical publication to make a sketch of him to accompany an engraving, I did my best on it. Jacob Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, said to me: "Now, Henry, here's your chance for a foreign appointment." I now know that my writing was clumsy enough and my attempt to play the courtier clumsier still. Nevertheless, as a friend of my father and mother "Old Buck" might have been a little more considerate than he was with a lad trying to please and do him honor. I came away from the White House my _amour propre_ wounded, and though I had not far to go went straight into the Douglas camp.