Then Lamar broke forth. He put Toombs' visit to Grant, "crawling at the seat of power," against his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heard such a scoring from one man to another. It was magisterial in its dignity, deadly in its diction. Nothing short of a duel could have settled it in the olden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, had finished, Toombs without a ruffle said, "Lamar, you surprise me," and the host, with the rest of us, took it as a signal to rise from table and rejoin the ladies in the drawing-room. Of course nothing came of it. Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him under fire and heard him crack jokes with Minié balls flying uncomfortably about. Some one spoke kindly of him to old Ben Wade. "Yes, yes," said Wade; "I never did believe in the doctrine of total depravity." But I am running ahead in advance of events. VI There came in 1853 to the Thirty-third Congress a youngish, dapper and graceful man notable as the only Democrat in the Massachusetts delegation. It was said that he had been a dancing master, his wife a work girl. They brought with them a baby in arms with the wife's sister for its nurse--a mis-step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now tell just how I came to be very intimate with them except that they lived at Willard's Hotel. His name had a pretty sound to it--Nathaniel Prentiss Banks. A schoolmate of mine and myself, greatly to the mirth of those about us, undertook Mr. Banks' career. We were going to elect him Speaker of the next House and then President of the United States. This was particularly laughable to my mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the contemporary Speaker, who had very solid presidential aspirations of his own. The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. Banks, to whom we two were ardently devoted. I have not seen her since those days, more than sixty years ago. But her beauty, which then charmed me, still lingers in my memory--a gentle, sweet creature who made much of us boys--and two years later when Mr. Banks was actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated and took some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General Banks and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress, and he did not recall me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless I warmed to him, and when during Cleveland's first term he came to me with a hard-luck story I was glad to throw myself into the breach. He had been a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and a Governor of Massachusetts, but was a faded old man, very commonplace, and except for the little post he held under Government pitiably helpless.