He said he had never tried it, had forgotten it. Then, turning with an air half comic, but with something of earnestness, he said, naming me by way of start: "You have been holding a sort of autopsy over me ever since I tumbled over at Atlantic City. I exposed myself there too long both in the water and in the sun, but it was not so bad as you think."
I said he might pardon a degree of solicitude, under all the circumstances, and he said he did not want any premature autopsies held over him; and I put it that they had much better be premature. Then the President said, with the greatest earnestness: "I am in better health—indeed, quite well. It is curious, isn't it? My wife's sickness cured me. I got so anxious about her I ceased to think about myself. Both ends of the house were full of trouble. My wife's illness was alarming, and I thought no more of the pit of my stomach and the base of my brain and the top of my head; and when she was out of danger, and my little troubles occurred to me—why, they were gone, and I have not noticed them since. And so," said the President, uttering the short words with deliberation, and picking them with care, "and so, if one could, so to say, unself one's self, what a cure all that would be!"
"The other end of the White House is better, is it not?" I asked.
"Not so much change there," said the President; "but one becomes accustomed to heavy weather."
"Lord Roscoe is feeling happier, I hope," said I.
The President answered, dropping the "Lord Roscoe" comicality, and speaking rapidly and seriously, with a flush of excitement: "Conkling, after ten years of absolute despotism in New York—for Grant did everything for him, and Hayes tried to comfort him—got the elephantiasis of conceit. We read that gentlemen in Oriental countries, having that disease in its advanced stage, need a wheelbarrow or small wagon to aid their locomotion when they go out to walk—and the population think there is something divine in it. Conkling thought if he should go on parade in New York, and place the developments of his vanity fully on exhibition, the whole people would fall down and worship the phenomenon. But he was mistaken, for they soon saw it was a plain, old-fashioned case of sore-head."
Then the President, having exhausted the elephantiasis as a divine manifestation, expressed regrets that there had been such contentions among those who should be friends of the administration; and repeated his view of that which was due to the actual trust the people had placed in him, and of which he could not honorably divest himself. He thought the people already understood the case fairly well and would be more and more of the opinion that he had tried to do the things that were right, "with malice toward none and charity for all." We talked until midnight. It was a Friday morning, and the President was doomed to be shot the next day. The assassin had been on his path that night. The President had gone out dining for the last time.
"And you will not go to Williams College with me?" he said.
I said: "Mr. President, you have forgotten you were assailed for being in my company to Chautauqua; and I have been so fortunate since as to gather a fresh crop of enemies, and do not want them to jump on to you on my account—for there are enough upon you already."