me that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about General
Grant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority, was
maneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible.
Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of Senator
Morton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to enter.
Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him.
"Certainly," he said, "it is true."

The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had
heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added a
closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that I
had not gone quite daft.

"These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country. They
may have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to me betwixt
the sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that they are
buzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not unimportant
persons."

Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I, never a
simple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican newspapers
vied with one another which could say crossest things and laugh loudest.
One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, and
it was many a year before the phrase "between the sherry and the champagne"
ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic American, twice elevated to the
presidency, could want a third term, could have the hardihood to seek one
was inconceivable. My letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of my
own lack of intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, good
and strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encountered
the same criticism.