"Could we ever go into the house where the President lives?" asked Nan of her father that night.
"Yes, we can visit the White House or, rather, one room in it," said Mr. Bobbsey. "What they call the 'East Room' is the one in which visitors are allowed. Perhaps we may go there tomorrow, if Mr. Martin and I can finish some business we are working on."
After breakfast the next morning the Bobbsey twins were glad to hear their father say that he would take them to the White House; and, a little later, in company with other visitors, they were allowed to enter the home of the President, and walk about the big room on the east side of the White House.
"I'm going to sit down on one of the chairs," said Nan. "Maybe it will be one that the President once sat on."
"Very likely it will be," laughed Mrs. Bobbsey, as Nan picked out a place into which she "wiggled." From the chair she smiled at her brothers and sister, and they, too, took turns sitting in the same chair.
Bert found a pin on the thick green carpet in the room. The carpet was almost as thick and green as the moss in the woods, and how Bert ever saw the tiny pin I don't know. But he had very sharp eyes.
"What are you going to do with it?" asked his father.
"Just keep it," the boy answered. "Maybe it's a pin the President's wife once used in her clothes."
"Oh, you think it's a souvenir!" laughed Mrs. Bobbsey, as Bert stuck the pin in the edge of his coat. And for a long time he kept that common, ordinary pin, and he used to show it to his boy friends, and tell them where he found it.
"The White House President's pin," he used to call it.