they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to
fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a
prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I
could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.

If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the
best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those
friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They
were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been
wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr.
Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening
to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written,
and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I
remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the
other, and how we had some young men's joking and laughing together, in
the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon
its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I had ever seen the
President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before;
but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank
him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as
the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have
given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the
corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his
ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the
indistinguishable person in whose "integrity and abilities he had reposed
such special confidence" as to have appointed him consul for Venice and
the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have
recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them. I
faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that
every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand,