General Scott, who filled a large place in national affairs from Polk’s administration till the autumn of 1861, was a good officer and a pure patriot but full of eccentricities. His love for military forms gave him the nickname “Old Fuss and Feathers,” and a letter he wrote during the Mexican war, excusing his absence from his headquarters when the Secretary of War called there, on the plea that he had just stepped out to get “a hasty plate of soup,” had won for him the punning title “Marshal Turenne.” He was a good deal of a gourmet and did his family marketing himself, especially delighting in the delicacy which he persisted in calling “tarrapin,” and ordering his oysters by the barrel. One of his favorite dishes was pork jowl, and once he told of having eaten sauerkraut “with tears in his eyes.” He was a keen stickler for the dignity due him on all occasions. Just after Taylor had been inaugurated President, the two men met in Washington for the first time since a somewhat acrimonious parting in Mexico. Taylor, passing over old animosities, invited Scott to call. Scott did so the next day, and Taylor, who was engaged with some other gentlemen in his office, sent word that he would be down in a moment. Five minutes later, having cut his business short, the President descended to the parlor, to find his visitor already gone: Scott had waited two minutes by the clock and then stalked in high dudgeon out of the door, not to come back again. The drama of the Lincoln administration, on which the curtain rose to a bugle-blast and fell to the beat of muffled drums, deserves a volume to itself; but in my limited space I have been able to outline only some of its features directly related to the capital city. Lincoln’s first levee was held not in the White House but at Willard’s Hotel, some days before the inauguration. The higher public functionaries and their wives, and a number of private citizens of prominence, had been notified rather than invited to come to the hotel on a certain evening for a first glimpse of the new chief magistrate. Into this presence stalked the lank, loose-jointed, oddly clad “Old Abe,” with his little, simple, white-shawled wife at his elbow, and the never failing jest on his lips as he made his own announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you the long and the short of the Presidency!”