“I thought there was a good deal of disturbance!” Aunt Jenny placidly remarked. The fire occurred on a Saturday night. Sunday morning Miss Elizabeth Peabody was found trying to make her way across one of the danger zones roped off and guarded by the police. “Where did you want to go, Ma’am?” asked a policeman. “To Sunday school! Please let me pass--my class is waiting.” “Nary a scholar is waiting for you, Ma’am. There ain’t no church, nor yet no Sunday school.” The presidential election of this year was one of the most exciting I remember. General Grant was running for his second term; he had been first elected in 1868 with Schuyler Colfax as vice president. In 1872 Colfax withdrew in favor of our friend Henry Wilson. My father was a Grant man, and our house was, as usual, the center of much activity as the election drew near. My mother gave a reception for General and Mrs. Grant, where there was a great gathering of the Republican clan, and my father was constantly receiving committees and delegations. A section of the Republicans, dissatisfied with party politics during Grant’s first term, “split off” and nominated Horace Greeley for president, with Gratz Brown as his running mate, the Democrats indorsing the nomination. Greeley was then sixty-one years old. Judging by the portraits, he must have been rather rustic in appearance, wearing old-fashioned chin whiskers. The campaign was a bitter one. Greeley was unmercifully caricatured by Thomas Nast and other cartoonists. My parents, who had great respect for Greeley, resented the ridicule to which he was subjected. I remember, among other instruments of torture, an absurd portrait of him on a paper fan with a long white cotton fluff representing his beard. This was widely circulated. Greeley’s death, a few weeks after his defeat at the polls, was said to have been caused by the suffering he endured in this cruel campaign. As founder and for thirty years editor of the _New York Tribune_, as a patron of artists and men of letters, he might have hoped for better treatment at the hands of the press. The very papers whose ridicule broke his heart were full of handsome obituary notices after he was gone. It was deeply impressed on me at this time that to run the gantlet of a presidential election, a man must have more than common courage.