He said to me on a Saturday when I was introducing a party of Kentucky
friends: "Come up to-morrow for luncheon. Come early, for Rose"--his
sister, for the time being mistress of the White House--"will be at church
and we can have an old-fashioned talk-it-out."

The next day we passed the forenoon together. He was full of homely and
often whimsical talk. He told me he had not yet realized what had happened
to him.

"Sometimes," he said, "I wake at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it is
not all a dream."

He asked an infinite number of questions about this, that and the other
Democratic politician. He was having trouble with the Kentucky Congressmen.
He had appointed a most unlikely scion of a well-known family to a foreign
mission, and another young Kentuckian, the son of a New York magnate, to a
leading consul generalship, without consultation with any one. He asked me
about these. In a way one of them was one of my boys, and I was glad to see
him get what he wanted, though he aspired to nothing so high. He was indeed
all sorts of a boy, and his elevation to such a post was so grotesque that
the nomination, like that of his mate, was rejected by the Senate. I
gave the President a serio-comic but kindly account, at which he laughed
heartily, and ended by my asking how he had chanced to make two such
appointments.

"Hewitt came over here," he answered, "and then Dorsheimer. The father is
the only Democrat we have in that great corporation. As to the other, he
struck me as a likely fellow. It seemed good politics to gratify them and
their friends."