The White House

It was mid-July in the year eighteen hundred and twenty-five. The clock on the Treasury building had just struck four, and the clerks, hastily closing the drawers of their desks, replacing documents in their respective boxes and pens on their racks, lost no time in taking their hats and laying aside the work of the State, to give all their attention to private business or pleasure.

Amid the multitude of persons of all ages who thronged the long corridors, a gentleman of some twenty-seven or twenty-eight years, after arranging his knives, his pencils and his eraser much more methodically than young men are accustomed to do, and after carefully brushing his hat and coat, placed under his arm a large green portfolio, which at a little distance might have been mistaken for that of the head of a department, and assuming an affable, smiling expression, he joined the crowd that was hurrying toward the door, saluting to right and left those of his colleagues who, as they passed him, said:

"Bonjour, Robineau!"......