He was an early riser, and his work began the moment he left his pillow.  First came his letters, always a heavy drain upon his time; for he had been so long a public man that everybody felt free to consult him, and everybody that consulted him was sure of a polite answer.  Then his personal friends had their claims, some of them running back to youth, some the gradual accession of later years, and all of them cherished with that genial and confiding expansiveness which was the great charm of his private life, and the chief source, when he did err, of his errors as a public man.  Like all the men of Washington’s school, he was systematically industrious; and by dint of system and industry his immense correspondence was seldom allowed to get the start of him.  Important letters were answered as they came, and minutes or copies of the answers kept for reference.  He seemed to love his pen, and to write without effort,—­never aiming, it is true, at the higher graces of style, somewhat diffuse, too, both in French and in English, but easy, natural, idiomatic, and lucid, with the distinctness of clear conceptions rather than the precision of vigorous conceptions, and a warmth which in his public letters sometimes rose to eloquence, and in his private letters often made you feel as if you were listening instead of reading.

He was fond of anecdote, and told his stories with the fluency of a man accustomed to public speaking, and the animation and point of a man accustomed to the society of men of wit as well as of men of action.  His recollections were wonderfully distinct, and it always gave me a peculiar thrill to hear him talk about the great men he had lived and acted with in both hemispheres, as familiarly as if he had parted from them only an hour before.  It was bringing history very close to me, and peopling it with living beings,—­beings of flesh and blood, who ate and drank and slept and wore clothes as we do; for here was one of them, the friend and companion of the greatest among them all, whom I had known through books, as I knew them long before I knew him in actual life, and every one of whose words and gestures seemed to give me a clearer conception of what they, too, must have been.

Still he never appeared to live in the recollections of his youth, as most old men do.  His life was too active a one for this, and the great principles he had consecrated it to were too far-reaching and comprehensive, too full of living, actual interest, too fresh and vigorous in their vitality, to allow a man of his sanguine and active temperament to forget himself in the past when there was so much to do in the present.  This gave a peculiar charm to his conversation; for, no matter what the subject might be, he always talked like a man who believed what he said, and whose faith, a living principle of thought and action, was constantly kept in a genial glow by the quickness and depth of his sympathies.  His smile told this; for it was full of sweetness and gentleness, though with a dash of earnestness about it, an under-current of serious thought, that made you feel as if you wanted to look behind it, and reminded you, at times, of a landscape at sunset, when there is just light enough to show you how many things there are in it that you would gladly dwell upon, if the day were only a little longer.