The next President was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, also a Democrat. The two incidents in his term which most impressed Washington were the first successful experiments with the Atlantic cable in August, 1858, and the visit to the White House of the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII. Cyrus W. Field, after a struggle as soul-wearing as Morse’s over the introduction of the telegraph, succeeded in making his submarine cable work and induced Queen Victoria to send the first despatch, a message of greeting to President Buchanan, who was requested to answer it in kind. The skepticism of the day toward all scientific novelties was reflected in Buchanan’s summoning a newspaper correspondent whom he trusted and begging to be told frankly whether he were not the victim of a hoax. At the White House all the members of the Cabinet were gathered, earnestly debating the same question. The most stubborn disbeliever was the Secretary of the Treasury, Howell Cobb, who jeered at the whole thing as a wild absurdity. In spite of Cobb’s resistance, the correspondent persuaded the President to answer the Queen’s message. As bad luck would have it, the cable parted in mid-ocean soon thereafter and was not restored to working order for several years; and in the interval the skeptics were appropriately exultant. Buchanan, who was our first bachelor President, was sometimes slangily called “the O. P. F.,” having once referred to himself in a message as an “old public functionary.” The image of him carried in the popular mind is derived from contemporaneous pictures, which show him as a stiff, precise, ministerial-looking old man, wearing a black coat, a high choker collar, and a spotless white neckerchief. But this was the style of the day in portraiture and must not be accepted too literally. The late Frederick O. Prince of Boston used to tell of a morning call he paid Buchanan, whom he had imagined a model of formality and elegance, and of his astonishment when the President entered the room clad in a greenish figured dressing-gown, woolen socks, and carpet slippers, and, to put the standing visitors at their ease, called to a servant: “Jeems, sit some cheers!” When Buchanan came to Washington for his inauguration, attended by a number of Pennsylvania friends, he took lodgings at the National Hotel, where the whole party fell ill with symptoms which to-day we should charge to ptomaine poisoning. One or two of the sufferers died. Buchanan escaped with a comparatively light attack; but a rumor gained circulation that the Free Soilers had tried to assassinate him because of his conservative disposition toward slavery. For some time after he entered the White House, therefore, the police kept a watch on his movements, and one rough-looking Kansan was arrested on suspicion, having bought an air-gun and engaged a room in a building which the President was in the habit of passing every day when he went out for exercise.