You ought to have heard him storm!  One would have supposed I had committed a crime of some kind.  But I didn’t mind.  I said it was cheap, and full of republican simplicity, and perfectly safe.  I said that, for a tranquil pleasure excursion, there was nothing equal to a raft.

Then the Secretary of the Navy asked me who I was; and when I told him I was connected with the government, he wanted to know in what capacity.  I said that, without remarking upon the singularity of such a question, coming, as it did, from a member of that same government, I would inform him that I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology.  Then there was a fine storm!  He finished by ordering me to leave the premises, and give my attention strictly to my own business in future.  My first impulse was to get him removed.  However, that would harm others besides himself, and do me no real good, and so I let him stay.

I went next to the Secretary of War, who was not inclined to see me at all until he learned that I was connected with the government.  If I had not been on important business, I suppose I could not have got in.  I asked him for alight (he was smoking at the time), and then I told him I had no fault to find with his defending the parole stipulations of General Lee and his comrades in arms, but that I could not approve of his method of fighting the Indians on the Plains.  I said he fought too scattering.  He ought to get the Indians more together—­get them together in some convenient place, where he could have provisions enough for both parties, and then have a general massacre.  I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre.  If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education.  Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.  It undermines his constitution; it strikes at the foundation of his being.  “Sir,” I said, “the time has come when blood-curdling cruelty has become necessary.  Inflict soap and a spelling-book on every Indian that ravages the Plains, and let them die!”

The Secretary of War asked me if I was a member of the Cabinet, and I said I was.  He inquired what position I held, and I said I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology.  I was then ordered under arrest for contempt of court, and restrained of my liberty for the best part of the day.

I almost resolved to be silent thenceforward, and let the Government get along the best way it could.  But duty called, and I obeyed.  I called on the Secretary of the Treasury.  He said: 

“What will you have?”

The question threw me off my guard.  I said, “Rum punch.”

He said:  “If you have got any business here, sir, state it—­and in as few words as possible.”