I was volunteered an entrée everywhere, from the humblest government
office to the Capitol and White House, and in each and all was courteously
received. In subsequent years I had also great reason for gratitude to Mr.
Colfax, who not only gave his own patronage, but presented me to Congress,
the members of which vied with each other in liberality.




CHAPTER V.

"Thus, with delight, we linger to survey
The promised joys of life's unmeasured way;
Thus, from afar, each dim discovered scene
More pleasing seems than all the rest hath been;
And every form that fancy can repair
From dark oblivion, glows divinely there."


My nature, in its first struggle with the world, shrank, like Mimosa, from
every human touch; but the kind words of love and gentle acts of kindness
already received transformed and ripened within me a more trusting and
hopeful character, and I almost unconsciously accepted as immutable and
inevitable the great law of compensation.

It is well that it was in the season of youth that my career began, that
season which Jean Paul so poetically designates as "The Festival Day of
Life," in which period friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian
Temple, not, as in later years, in a narrow Gothic Chapel.