Faces of old men and young men were there,—some weary and anxious, a few persistently jocose, and nearly all betraying the unmistakable Southern type. It was, on the whole, a well-dressed crowd, for one so abominably filthy.
“Nineteen out of twenty of all these people,” I was told by the President’s secretary, “are pardon-seeking Rebels. The most of them are twenty-thousand-dollar men, anxious to save their estates from confiscation.”
As the President’s doors were expected soon to be opened, and as I wished to observe his manner of dealing with those men, I remained after finishing my business with the secretary, and mingled with the crowd. The fumes of heated bodies, in the ill-ventilated halls, were far from agreeable; and as the time dragged heavily, and the doors of the President’s room continued closed, except when some favored individual, who had sent in his card, perhaps hours before, was admitted, I was more than once on the point of abandoning my object for a breath of fresh out-door air.
The conversation of my Southern friends, however, proved sufficiently interesting to detain me. One gay and jaunty old man was particularly diverting in his remarks. He laughed at the melancholy ones for their long faces, pretending that he could tell by each man’s looks which clause of the exceptions, in the President’s amnesty proclamation, his case came under.
“You were a civil officer under the Confederate government. Am I right? Of course I am. Your face shows it. My other friend here comes under No. 3,—he was an officer in the army. That sad old gentleman yonder, with a standing collar, looks to me like one of those who left their homes within the jurisdiction of the United States to aid the Rebellion. He’s a number ten-er. And I reckon we are all thirteen-ers,”—that is to say, persons of the thirteenth excepted class, the value of whose taxable property exceeded twenty thousand dollars.
“Well, which clause do you come under?” asked one.
“I am happy to say, I come under three different clauses. Mine’s a particularly beautiful case. I’ve been here every day for a week waiting on the President, and I expect to have the pleasure of standing at this door many a day to come. Take example by me, and never despair.” And the merry old man frisked away, with his cap slightly on one side, covering gray hairs. His gay spirits, in that not very hilarious throng, attracted a good deal of attention: but his was not the mirth of an inwardly happy mind.
“You are not a Southern man?” said one, singling me out.
“No,” said I; “I am a Yankee.”
“You are not after a pardon, then. Lucky for you!”