As Senator La Follette once said, McKinley never had a fair chance as President to show what was in him: his first term was broken into by the Spanish War, and his second was cut off almost at its beginning by assassination. He was sweet-natured and a born manager of men, and no one who ever filled the Presidential chair left behind him a more fragrant memory. As his murder occurred in Buffalo, and Czolgosz, who killed him, was tried and put to death there, the episode serves our present purpose only in leading up to the accession of Theodore Roosevelt of New York, the Vice-president, who was recalled from a summer vacation in the mountains to take the head of the state. His inauguration was of the simplest sort, at the house of a friend in Buffalo, where some members of the McKinley Cabinet and a few other gentlemen met to witness the administration of the oath. His first few months in the White House convinced the new President that something must be done without delay to relieve the building, which had become not only inconvenient but dangerous. For several years, when repairs had been found necessary, they had been made by temporary patchwork, with little reference to their effect on anything else; not a few of the floor timbers subject to most strain were badly rotted, and others stood in so perilous relations to the lighting apparatus that only by a miracle had the house escaped destruction by fire. Fortunately Congress had begun to show some interest in a long-mooted project for bringing the city back to the plan laid out by L’Enfant; and a generous appropriation was procured for making over the White House to resemble as nearly as practicable the President’s Palace built by Hoban. All the latter half of 1902 was given to this work. The office was moved out of the main building and planted in a little house of its own on the same spot where Jefferson used to have his workroom, at the extremity of the western terrace. The eastern terrace, of which nothing but the buried foundations remained, was rebuilt, and so arranged as to afford an entrance for guests at the larger receptions.