RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
make arrangements for our comfortable reception. His description of his first day in Washington is, in the light of later events, rather amusing.
He arrived at six o’clock on a cold, gloomy February morning at the old dirty Pennsylvania station. He wandered out on the street with a heavy bag in his hand looking for a porter, but there were no porters. Then he stood for a few moments looking up at the Capitol and feeling dismally unimportant in the midst of what seemed to him to be very formidable surroundings. He wondered to himself why on earth he had come. He was sure he had made a fatal mistake in exchanging a good position and a pleasant circle at home, where everybody knew him, for a place in a strange and forbidding city where he knew practically nobody and where, he felt sure, nobody wanted to know him. He lugged his bag up to the old Ebbitt House and, after eating a lonesome breakfast, he went to the Department of Justice to be sworn in. After that ceremony was over and he had shaken hands with the Attorney General, he went up to inspect the Solicitor General’s Office, and there he met the most dismal sight of the whole dismal day. His “quarters” consisted of a single room, three flights up, and bearing not the slightest resemblance to his mental picture of what the Solicitor General’s offices would be like. The Solicitor General’s stenographer, it seemed, was a telegrapher in the chief clerk’s office and had to be sent for when his services were required. Altogether it must have been a very disheartening outlook.
As Mr. Taft sat looking over briefs and other papers, and trying to get some definite idea about his new work, a messenger brought in a card.
“Mr. Evarts, New York,” it read.
Evarts was a well-known name, of course, but it was hard for Mr. Taft to believe that the William M. Evarts, leader of the American Bar and then Senator from New York,
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