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 somebody must get sober and keep sober." From the hour of that realization, when he "swore off," to the hour of his death he never touched intoxicants of any sort.
He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had been elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty.

Then he fell in love.

The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly educated, a schoolmate of my mother's elder sister.