“The senator was socially at his best when in an environment of informality, and gained largest relief from fatigue or responsibilities when surrounded by a group of congenial friends at Congress Hall Hotel, where he lived during his official career in Washington. His hotel life was methodical. He went to bed at ten o’clock every night and was at the breakfast table at eight in the morning. After supper each evening (or dinner, as fashionable Washington calls it) he would retire to his room and recline in a comfortable chair and there for an hour, under canopy of smoke from a ‘home made’ cigar, he would read the evening papers. Then he would go down to the lobby of the hotel and there join the ‘statesman’s circle’ and lightly or seriously discuss the issues of the day, swap refreshing anecdotes of laughable incidents on the hustings, in the courts and in politics, and rarely failing to illustrate some feature of the conversation by recounting some misfortune or act of unsophistication of his boyhood career in a village neighborhood near his dear Kokomo, or of his struggles to gain a footing in law or politics. Not only did he love to indulge in personal reminiscences, but even more did he enjoy communing with memories of happy association with brilliant and picturesque men of other days in every county in Indiana. His fund of true-to-life stories was voluminous and ever delightful. He could not ‘hold a candle’ to Champ Clark in recital of rare and fascinating biography of great men, but in dramatic or quaint description of their striking or peculiar characteristics and in portrayal of the attributes which made them conspicuous as state or national figures he was a delight extraordinary. “Also in friendly repartee and ready wit he was a great favorite. Speaking of his passive regard for the theater, the wife of a well-known Indiana congressman one evening approached her husband and the senator, as they were indulging in their daily visit, and inquired of the former if she should order tickets for an evening with the drama, then on at a Washington playhouse. When advised to do so she invited the senator to accompany them. ‘Is it a good laugh?’ he inquired. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but next week Montgomery and Ward (slip of the tongue for Montgomery and Stone) are to be here in the Red Mill and that will be a laugh for you.’ ‘Delightful,’ the senator replied, ‘when will Sears and Roebuck be here?’ “One evening the lone Socialist of the house was regaling a group, of which Senator Kern was one, with an impassioned screed against whatever was and reached a climax in the vociferous explosion, ‘My God, Senator, has reason been entirely dethroned?’ ‘I guess it has,’ was the senator’s meek and pacific reply.