Our advent discovered a crust of ice and snow to our feet, and a mortal sharpness in the air that was like a tonic. During those three or four days since our coming, a thaw had befallen which left thoroughfares a discouraging swale of mire, and made going about a foulest possible employ. Withal, as though sponsor for the softening temperature, there descended a fog--fairly a hash of misty rain that one might wash one's face in--and the air was as full of water as a sponge. These were no true conditions for the General, with lungs never the hardiest, and whose health was more than commonly broken by the blow of his wife's death. She was soundly, deeply sleeping in her grave in Tennessee, and the new sods above her counted but twelve weeks for their age, when we rode into Washington. She had heard the guns and the music which told of her hero's triumph; and then, heart-stricken of shafts of slander aimed against her sinlessness by an opposition willing to conquer with black means, she bowed her gentle head and passed. She was not to multiply a White House honor by sharing it, and left her lover-husband to go his presidential way alone unlighted of her eyes. Those dark scenes at the Hermitage when the General's angel went from us, and storms of grief--so utter, so beyond repair!--fair beat upon him to a point which all but laid him beneath the grass-roots to keep her company, have neither part nor lot in this relation. They may be guessed at, however; and the General came forth of them woe-worn and shaken, and with the thought in his soul that she perished by the venom of his enemies, who had struck at his fortunes by striking at her pure repute. After his wife died I had been in the grip of sore concern for the General. He was but a frail man at his best; he carried lead in his shoulder and lead in his side--private bullets stopped in private wars, truly, yet no less, perilous for that--and when on these, plus the angry work and wrath of a campaign, was laid this funeral farther load, I say, I trembled for the upcome. Our way to Washington was to be by the Cumberland and the Ohio to Pittsburg, and then overland through the mountains, and so along the Potomac. All Tennessee seemed come to Nashville when we went aboard; I helping the General--whose weakness was so great he must, despite vanity, lean visibly on my support. As he sank exhausted into a chair, and the boat backed off the levee, I was in blackness for the gloom I felt. I believed he would not live to see Washington, but fall by the way; I in no sort presupposed those eight tremendous years when the White House would be to the common folk as a temple, with him the idle of their adoration. I could not foresee his marvelous two presidencies, and how, his name brightening with each added sun and followed by every eye, he would retire again to privacy and his Hermitage, the best beloved since the even day of Jefferson.