and put up his hand to smooth his hair, boyish fashion. He visited Mr. Buchanan, the President, and then went on to Richmond, where he was not so well treated.
Mr. Buchanan wrote a beautiful letter to Queen Victoria about the manly bearing of her son, and of how well he had passed through a trying ordeal for one of his age. Indeed, Albert Edward always had tact; he has it still. "Dignified, frank, and affable, he has conciliated, wherever he has been, the kindness and respect of a sensitive and discriminating people," said Mr. Buchanan in this very good letter.
Probably one of the many reasons why Victoria and Albert were so friendly to the North when their friendship was needed was their remembrance of the kindness of the Northern people to their son.
Poor Mr. Buchanan! the Northerners were not satisfied that he was trying to prevent the war, and General Dix's emphatic message to an officer of the navy, "If any one fires on the American flag, shoot him on the spot," fired the American heart; and yet all the Southerners and Washingtonians thought Mr. Buchanan was doing exactly right. Miss Josephine Seaton wrote to Mr. Buchanan, in June, 1862: "I consider you the last constitutional President we shall ever see. At a moment when passion whirled the country to frenzy you had the true courage to refrain, to abide within the lines marked out by the Constitution for the Executive. Were you still with us we should not be embarked in this fearful fratricidal strife."
Such were the two sides of the shield. I think every American should be glad to have not seen that fratricidal strife.
And yet it was profoundly grand and heart-stirring. I had just grown to know Theodore Winthrop, the young
