“The President smiled, mused a little, and said:
“‘My advice would be to wait until the Attorney General returns from Oregon. I know it is a hardship for the rightful owner of the land to wait so long, but the question is, would it not be longer if the Solicitor finds other reasons to take this case into his own hands. Now he has promised me to let the matter rest until the Attorney General comes back.’
“‘Yes,’ my uncle said, ‘I think what you advise is the best thing to do. Evidently the Solicitor is beating the bush to start some game, and will be satisfied with a ‘mare's nest,’ if he can only entangle the Attorney General in it. But this is a very paltry and picayunish business for a Solicitor General, Mr. President, and it is silly, too, because he has shown his hand to little purpose. He has plainly demonstrated how anxious he is to find something against the Attorney General, but that something he hasn't got yet.’
“The President laughed, and said: ‘You mustn't be so hard on the Solicitor.’
“It was decided that my uncle would return to New York by the four o'clock train that afternoon, and I would remain to receive the opinion in writing which the Solicitor had promised the President he would give.
“I did not have to wait until next day for that profound opinion. As I was going to dinner at six o'clock, a messenger handed me a closed official envelope which felt quite heavy. But that was all the weight the thing possessed, for it was the lightest, most vapory composition that a grown-up man, long past boyhood, could evolve from a mature brain.
“It made me angry to read it. ‘The man is evidently not a fool, but thinks we are,’ I said to myself, and made up my mind I would go next morning and tell him to his face what I thought of his conduct and his document.
“Promptly at ten o'clock next morning I presented myself at the Attorney General's office, and was immediately ushered before the august presence of the great Solicitor, the mighty hunter of ‘mare's nests.’ He evidently thought I had come to thank him for his vapory effusion, for he received me quite smilingly, and without a trace of that hauteur which he had at first meant should be so crushing.
“Taking the chair he so graciously offered me, I said: ‘Sir, without meaning any disrespect to the Solicitor General of the United States, I would like to inquire what is the meaning of the document I had the honor to receive from you yesterday?’
“He colored up, but still smiling, answered: ‘Did you not understand it? I thought I wrote in very plain English.’