He waited calmly until the President, recovered from the fatigues of his journey, should begin to feel the effect of a Washington atmosphere.

Then on Wednesday morning, Mr.Ratcliffe left his rooms an hour earlier than usual on his way to the Senate, and called at the President's Hotel: he was ushered into a large apartment in which the new Chief Magistrate was holding court, although at sight of Ratcliffe, the other visitors edged away or took their hats and left the room.

The President proved to be a hard-featured man of sixty, with a hooked nose and thin, straight, iron-gray hair.

His voice was rougher than his features and he received Ratcliffe awkwardly.

He had suffered since his departure from Indiana.
Out there it had seemed a mere flea-bite, as he expressed it, to brush Ratcliffe aside, but in Washington the thing was somehow different.
Even his own Indiana friends looked grave when he talked of it, and shook their heads.