“But a president may veto a bill,” I would reply, “or make it a law with his fist. He may bring down a war.”
“And yet he is no free agent when he does any of these,” he would return. “He is pressed upon by one force or another, or mayhap a dozen at once, and must go with conditions like a man in a landslide. As I say, the office is so much bigger than the man that it transacts the man, and not the man the office. It is as though one were made president of the Potomac, or of a glacier. Could he take the one beyond its banks with a war or stay the other in its progress with a veto? He might run up a flag, order a bugle blown, fire a gun; but the river or the glacier would be the last impressed. No, sir; were one made chief magistrate of that snowstorm which now whitens the world outside, and set to rule its flakes, he would be in as much control as when given a White House and told that he is President.”
Mayhap it will interest should I offer a report of one of our afternoons. It might go as specimen of all, for each was but a strolling here and there of talk. Our discourse would be hit or miss, like a rag carpet, and would fall foul of whatever caught the eye or stubbed the toe of fancy at the moment.
On this day, and being weary with the sight of Peg's empty chair, I went down the hall to the General's workroom and found him with his nose in Tristram Shandy.'
“Do you like your author?” said I.
“Why, sir,” said the General, laying aside the book, “he is so grown up to sedge of phrase and choked of word-weeds as to deny one either the sight or the taste of the true stream of his story.”
“Walpole,” I returned, “said that reading Tristram was to laugh a moment and yawn an hour.”
“Then he had the better of me, since I have done nothing but yawn.” After a pause: “Peg gave me the book; it was my loyalty to the child that sent me between its pages. And speaking of Peg: Do you still send her the roses? I know you do, for I met your Jim on his way to her, buried in blossoms and looking for all the world like the flower booth in a village fair.” Here the General lazily reached for his pipe.
“And why should she not have the flowers?” I demanded, warmly.
“No reason under the sky, sir,” said he, giving me that old glance out of the falcon eyes of him—to anger me, I suppose—“none under the sky! Send our pretty Peg the roof off the house should she have a mind for it.” Then, when now his pipe was going: “Was it not you to recommend a round, squat, corpulent being named Curtis to be marshal for Tennessee?”