“‘And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord; and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears.’
Then he rises, and, with manuscript in his hands, begins to “battle with the breeze,” and to read his inaugural, which nobody hears. Behind him sits his wife and daughter, the ladies of the Cabinet, the Diplomatic Corps. What a compound of the ornamental and comfortable? Yet nobody is comfortable—not here. We can catch no word through the outbearing wind, yet know that for the second time Ulysses S. Grant has sworn to the oath of office, according to the constitution, and for four more years is made President of the United States. It seems but yesterday we saw a loftier head, a sadder face, bowed above that book, within one little month of its eternity; when, amid the booming of cannon and the huzzas of the people, Abraham Lincoln for the second time was pronounced the people’s President, and by the same lips which now utter the same words for another, a happier, a more fortunate man.
Now the carnival of salute; the Middies fire their howitzers, thirty-seven guns; the Second Artillery fire twenty-one salvos; the Firemen ring the bells of their engines; ten thousand men warm their hands with hat swinging, and make their throats sore with shouting. Amid all, the multitude and the procession surge back towards the Executive Mansion. Between the latter and Lafayette square, the review, the return march, the military pageant culminates. The President, with lady friends, enters the pavilion built for the purpose, and the troops march by, encircling two solid squares; the West Point Cadets appear below Corcoran’s building, marching downward, as the magnificent New York Regiment—a thousand men—just arrived after an all night’s freezing delay, have reached Fifteenth street, marching up. The entire body of soldiery march and mass, till as far as the eyes can reach through the glittering sunshine, one only sees gleaming helmets, flashing bayonets, glancing sabers, the Cadets on double quick, the Middies firing their howitzers, officers displaying fine horses and uniforms, drum-majors tossing their batons, bands playing, and cannon thundering.
Amid all these the four horses dashing before the Presidential barouche, bear the President to the Executive door, which now mercifully shuts them from our sight.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A PEEP AT AN INAUGURATION BALL.
How Sixty Thousand Dollars were Spent—Something wrong: “’Twas ever Thus”—Recollection of another Festival—How “the dust” was Raised—A Fine Opportunity for a Few Naughty Words—Lost Jewels—The Colored Folks in a Fix—Overpowered by Numbers—Six Thousand People Clamoring for their Clothes!—“Promiscuous” Property—A Magnificent “Grab”—Weeping on Window-ledges—Left Desolate—Walking under Difficulties—The Exploits of Two Old Gentlemen—Horace Greeley Loses his Old White Hat—He says Naughty Words of Washington—Seeking the Lost—Still Cherished by Memory—Some People Remind General Chipman—“Regardless of Expense”—A Ball-Room Built of Wooden Laths and Muslin—A Little Too Cold—Gay Decorations—How “Delicate” Women can Endure the Cold—Modesty in Scanty Garments—The President Frozen—The “Cherubs, Perched up Aloft,” Refuse to Sing—On the Presidential Platform—Ladies of Distinction—Half-frozen Beauties—“They did not Make a Pretty Picture”—Why and Wherefore?—A Protest against[against] “Shams”—A Stolid Tanner who Fought his Way.
Untold time, and trouble, and sixty thousand dollars were expended on the last inauguration ball building, and yet there was something the matter with the inaugural ball. There is always something the matter with every inauguration ball.
When I wish to think of a spot especially suggestive of torments, I think of an inauguration ball. There was the one before the last, held in the Treasury Building. The air throughout the entire building was perforated with a fine dust ground till you felt that you were taking in with every breath a myriad homœopathic doses of desiccated grindstone. The agonies of that ball can never be written. There are mortals dead in their grave because of it. There are mortals who still curse, and swear, and sigh at the thought of it. There are diamonds, and pearls, and precious garments that are not to their owners because of it. The scenes in those cloak and hat rooms can never be forgotten by any who witnessed them. The colored messengers, called from their posts in the Treasury to do duty in these rooms, received hats and wraps with perfect facility, and tucked them in loop-holes as it happened. But to give them back, each to its owner, that was impossible. Not half of them could read numbers, and those who could soon grew bewildered, overpowered, ill-tempered and impertinent under the hosts that advanced upon them for cloaks and hats.
Picture it! Six or more thousand people clamoring for their clothes! In the end they were all tumbled out “promiscuous” on the floor. Then came the siege! Few seized their own, but many snatched other people’s garments—anything, something, to protect them from the pitiless morning, whose wind came down like the bite of death. Delicate women, too sensitive to take the property of others, crouched in corners, and wept on window ledges; and there the daylight found them. Carriages, also, had fled out of the scourging blast, and the men and women who emerged from the marble halls, with very little to wear, found that they must “foot it” to their habitations. One gentleman walked to Capitol Hill, nearly two miles, in dancing pumps and bare-headed; another performed the same exploit, wrapped in a lady’s sontag.
Poor Horace Greeley, after expending his wrath on the stairs and cursing Washington anew as a place that should be immediately blotted out of the universe, strode to his hotel hatless. The next day and the next week were consumed by people searching for their lost clothes, and General Chipman says that he still receives letters demanding articles lost at that inauguration ball.