"Yes," the President said, "and I am feeling like a schoolboy about it. You should go. You were along with Harrison, Kirkwood, and me to Chautauqua, you know. That was a great day's ride. Do you remember those watermelons? They would have been first-rate if they had been on ice a few hours." "You had a hard day of it," I said; "forty speeches, weren't there? And you will have another lot of speeches to make." He said he did not mind the speeches. "And how is your health," I asked; "any more indigestion? Ever try Billy Florence's remedy, Valentine's meat juice, made in Richmond, Virginia--great reputation abroad, little at home?" He said he had never tried it, had forgotten it. Then, turning with an air half comic, but with something of earnestness, he said, naming me by way of start: "You have been holding a sort of autopsy over me ever since I tumbled over at Atlantic City. I exposed myself there too long both in the water and in the sun, but it was not so bad as you think." I said he might pardon a degree of solicitude, under all the circumstances, and he said he did not want any premature autopsies held over him; and I put it that they had much better be premature. Then the President said, with the greatest earnestness: "I am in better health--indeed, quite well. It is curious, isn't it? My wife's sickness cured me. I got so anxious about her I ceased to think about myself. Both ends of the house were full of trouble. My wife's illness was alarming, and I thought no more of the pit of my stomach and the base of my brain and the top of my head; and when she was out of danger, and my little troubles occurred to me--why, they were gone, and I have not noticed them since. And so," said the President, uttering the short words with deliberation, and picking them with care, "and so, if one could, so to say, unself one's self, what a cure all that would be!" "The other end of the White House is better, is it not?" I asked. "Not so much change there," said the President; "but one becomes accustomed to heavy weather." "Lord Roscoe is feeling happier, I hope," said I. The President answered, dropping the "Lord Roscoe" comicality, and speaking rapidly and seriously, with a flush of excitement: "Conkling, after ten years of absolute despotism in New York--for Grant did everything for him, and Hayes tried to comfort him--got the elephantiasis of conceit. We read that gentlemen in Oriental countries, having that disease in its advanced stage, need a wheelbarrow or small wagon to aid their locomotion when they go out to walk--and the population think there is something divine in it. Conkling thought if he should go on parade in New York, and place the developments of his vanity fully on exhibition, the whole people would fall down and worship the phenomenon. But he was mistaken, for they soon saw it was a plain, old-fashioned case of sore-head."