Suddenly--the great door opens, just a little. A thin, wiry man in gray steps into the room and takes his position near the head of the crescent. An aide in undress military uniform stands close to him, two sharp-faced young men stand a little to the left of them and act as a human Scylla and Charybdis through which all must pass. There are no preliminaries--no hint of ceremony. Within five seconds of the time when the President has taken his place, the line begins to move forward. In twenty minutes he has shaken hands with three or four hundred people and the reception is over. But in the brief fraction of a single minute when your hand has grasped that of the President you feel that he knows no one else on earth. He concentrates upon you and that, in itself, is a gift of which any statesman may well be proud. And while you are thinking of the pleasure that his word or two of greeting has given you, you awake to find yourself out of the room and hunting for your umbrella at the check-stand in the lower hall. The pleasant personal feeling is with you even after you have left the shelter of the White House roof. It is showering gently and a man under a tree is murmuring something about Secretary Bryan seeing visitors at a quarter to five but neither makes impress upon you. You are merely thinking how much easier it is to come to see the President of the greatest republic in the world than many a lesser man within it--railroad heads, bankers, even petty politicians. In other days it was not as easy to gain admittance to the President, but the tourist who was not above guile could be photographed shaking hands with the great person. A place on that always alluring Pennsylvania avenue did the trick. You stepped in a canvas screen into the place of the enlarged image of a sailor who was once snapped shaking hands with President Taft. When the picture was finished you were where the sailor had been, and you had a post-card that would make the folks back home take notice. True you were a little more prominent in it than the President, but then Mr. Taft was not paying for the picture. In fact Mr. Taft, when he heard of the practice, grew extremely annoyed and had it stopped, so ending abruptly one of the tourist joys of Washington.