Twenty years afterwards General Banks and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress, and he did not recall me at all or the episode of 1853.

Nevertheless I warmed to him, and when during Cleveland's first term he came to me with a hard-luck story I was glad to throw myself into the breach.

He had been a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and a Governor of Massachusetts, but was a faded old man, very commonplace, and except for the little post he held under Government pitiably helpless.
Colonel George Walton was one of my father's intimates and an imposing and familiar figure about Washington.

He was the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a distinction in those days, had been mayor of Mobile and was an unending raconteur.

To my childish mind he appeared to know everything that ever had been or ever would be.