Thus abandoned, I felt faint with terror, embarrassment, and conflicting decisions. It was a most painful ordeal to be left to go in alone to meet the august head of the nation--to rush alone into the privacy of the commander-in-chief of all the loyal armies of the Union. It was an especially trying period of the war which we had just passed through. Sherman's march to the sea was still in progress. The President had not yet received the historic telegram in which General Sherman offered him the city of Savannah as a Christmas gift, but he was well aware of the thorough devastation which that army left in its wake; and while he understood its necessity, the thought filled him with deepest gloom. Hood's Confederate army, which threatened for a time to repeat the successes of General Kirby Smith, had been crushed in Tennessee, but only after a period of suspense which stretched the nerves of all in administration circles to within a degree of the breaking point. In addition to this the voices of the "defeatists"--"Copperheads," they were called then--were heard far and wide in the land, ranting and howling their demand for a peace which would have been premature and inconclusive. The cares and sorrows of the President had hardly been more severe during the most critical days of the war than they were in December, 1864--it was the dark just before the dawn. Whether to turn and run for the street, to stand still, or to force myself to rap on that awful door was a question filling my soul with frightful emotions. I rubbed my head and walked several times across the vestibule to regain possession of my normal faculties. No one who has not been placed in such a startling situation can begin to realize what a stage-struck heartache afflicted me. I had been under fire and heard the shells crack and the bullets sing, but none of those experiences, so awful to a green soldier, had so filled my being with a desire to run away. But I recalled the fact that the President had the reputation of being a plain man to whom any citizen could speak on the street and was kind-hearted to an almost feminine degree, so I wiped my brow and at last drove myself over to the door. There, with the desperation such as the suicide must feel as he leaps from the cliff, I rapped hesitatingly on the door. Instantly a strong voice from inside shouted, "Come in and sit down." It was a command rather than an invitation.