The secret history of these exciting days, teeming with incident and concealing many startling revelations, has yet been but sparingly written; it is doubtful if the veil will ever be more than slightly lifted. Mr. Chandler himself guarded scrupulously from public knowledge much that was well known to him and a few associates and would have shed light on the hidden springs of actions of vast moment. This class of information he treated as state secrets, whose perishing with the actors in the great drama was desirable for public reasons. A well-known Washington journalist, who dined one day with Mr. Chandler and Mr. Wade, and listened with interest to their reminiscences of "war times," suggested to these gentlemen that their recollections should be recorded while they were still fresh for the benefit of history, and did succeed at first in obtaining their consent to an arrangement by which the two "war Senators" were to devote one evening in each week to the relation of the inside history of the period between the fall of 1860 and the end of Johnson's administration. These narratives were to be taken down by a stenographer, whose notes were to be written out, carefully compiled, and subjected to the revision of Messrs. Chandler and Wade. The manuscript was then to be sealed and placed in such keeping as should make it certain that it would not be published until the lapse of many years. On the following Saturday night the literary gentleman was promptly at Mr. Chandler's residence with the stenographer. Mr. Wade shortly afterward came in, and at once said: "I have been thinking this matter over, Chandler, and you must allow me to decline. There is no use in telling what we know unless we tell _the whole truth_, and if I tell the whole truth I shall blast too many reputations. These things would be interesting and valuable if they were preserved in a book, but they would not be as valuable as the reputations that would be destroyed. The days we were going to talk about were exciting days, when good men made mistakes, and their mistakes ought to be forgotten." Mr. Chandler promptly assented, and the reminiscences were never written.