“How do you do, Comrade?” he said, holding out his hand.
“General,” said Ephraim, “Mr. President,” he added, correcting himself, “how be you?” He shifted the green umbrella, and shook the hand timidly but warmly.
“General will do,” said the President, with a smiling glance at the tall senator beside him, “I like to be called General.”
“You've growed some older, General,” said Ephraim, scanning his face with a simple reverence and affection, “but you hain't changed so much as I'd a thought since I saw you whittlin' under a tree beside the Lacy house in the Wilderness.”
“My duty has changed some,” answered the President, quite as simply. He added with a touch of sadness, “I liked those days best, Comrade.”
“Well, I guess!” exclaimed Ephraim, “you're general over everything now, but you're not a mite bigger man to me than you was.”
The President took the compliment as it was meant.
“I found it easier to run an army than I do to run a country,” he said.
Ephraim's blue eyes flamed with indignation.
“I don't take no stock in the bull-dogs and the gold harness at Long Branch and—and all them lies the dratted newspapers print about you,”—Ephraim hammered his umbrella on the pavement as an expression of his feelings,—“and what's more, the people don't.”