In Jackson’s circumstances then a visitor seeking payment of a $3,000 account must have been about as unwelcome a guest as could well be imagined; but the affable manner in which he received that timid youth, shrinking from an unpleasant duty, showed the manner of man he was—and perhaps gives us a clue to the reason for the ardent admiration of his friends. Long before the Hermitage was formally opened to the public as a national shrine, visitors to Nashville, despite the difficulties involved, were in the habit of making the pilgrimage to Jackson’s old home to see the house where he had lived and to stand by his tomb. An interesting bit of human interest material is to be found in the visit, on the last day of March in 1851, of none other than the celebrated Mr. Phineas T. Barnum, accompanied by his current protégé, Jenny Lind. This was while Mr. Barnum was conducting the Swedish Nightingale on her history-making tour through the United States, during the course of which two concerts were given in Nashville. While there the immortal songstress, accompanied by Mr. Barnum, and his daughter, engaged a carriage and drove out the dusty road to the Hermitage. “On that occasion,” relates Mr. Barnum in his reminiscences, “for the first time that season, we heard the wild mocking-bird singing in the trees. This gave Jenny Lind great delight, as she had never before heard them sing except in their wire-bound cages.” That is all that Mr. Barnum says in his book about this incident, pregnant with beauty and romance. The Nightingale’s first encounter with her only rival, the Southern mocking-bird! What a subject there for a man with a poet’s imagination! But Mr. Barnum hurries on in his book to tell in great detail of an elaborate series of practical jokes he staged the next day—April Fool’s Day. But it is fascinating to let the mind play with the idea of the great Swedish singer standing there entranced that spring day beneath the hollies and cedars and magnolias of Old Hickory’s lawn, listening to the sad, sweet music of the native songbird. What wouldn’t history give for a motion picture, with sound effects, of that dramatic little episode on the Hermitage lawn touched on so briefly in his book by the voluble Mr. Barnum? This, by the way, was not Barnum’s first visit to the Hermitage. Early in 1838, while touring the South with a tented theatrical company, he relates that “We exhibited at Nashville (where I visited General Jackson at the Hermitage).” How tantalizingly economical with words is the old showman! How entertaining and enlightening it would be to know more about the visit of Barnum to Jackson! Barnum admitted that he was a master of humbuggery; some of Old Hickory’s opponents charged that he was a skilled practitioner of the same art. Did they admire each other? Why didn’t Barnum tell us more about his visits to the Hermitage?