In point of fact I have an impression that, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got there were loath to give it up.

We know that Grant was, and I am sure that Cleveland was.

We owe a great debt to Washington, because if a third why not a fourth term?
And then life tenure after the manner of the Caesars and Cromwells of history, and especially the Latin-Americans--Bolivar, Rosas and Diaz?
Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr.Blaine took me into his den and told 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.