The National Capitol--old men's fancies fondly turn to thoughts of
youth--was picturesque in its personalities if not in its architecture. By
no means the least striking of these was General and Senator Sam Houston,
of Texas. In his life of adventure truth proved very much stranger than
fiction.

The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pass no way without
attracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to have
him pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling his time
with his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into various
shapes of hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady acquaintances,
they usually went away thinking him a queer old man. So inded he was;
yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when he chose,
altogether the statesman and orator.

There united in him the spirits of the troubadour and the spearman. Ivanhoe
was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and the
prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean flood that
stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales to
tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer afternoon on the shady
side of Willard's Hotel--the Senate not in session--he might be seen,
an admiring group about him, spinning these yarns, mostly of personal
experience--rarely if ever repeating himself--and in tone, gesture and
grimace reproducing the drolleries of the backwoods, which from boyhood had
been his home.

He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in the
early days of his Texas career a drunkard. "Everybody got drunk," I once
heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as he
gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, "and I realized that