“Damn the woman,” said the Colonel as he picked his way down the steps.  “Or,” he added, as his thoughts took a new turn, “I wish my wife was in New Orleans.”

CHAPTER XL.

          Open your ears; for which of you will stop,
          The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks? 
          I, from the orient to the drooping west,
          Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
          The acts commenced on this ball of earth: 
          Upon my tongues continual slanders ride;
          The which in every, language I pronounce,
          Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

King Henry IV.

As may be readily believed, Col.  Beriah Sellers was by this time one of the best known men in Washington.  For the first time in his life his talents had a fair field.

He was now at the centre of the manufacture of gigantic schemes, of speculations of all sorts, of political and social gossip.  The atmosphere was full of little and big rumors and of vast, undefined expectations.  Everybody was in haste, too, to push on his private plan, and feverish in his haste, as if in constant apprehension that tomorrow would be Judgment Day.  Work while Congress is in session, said the uneasy spirit, for in the recess there is no work and no device.

The Colonel enjoyed this bustle and confusion amazingly; he thrived in the air of-indefinite expectation.  All his own schemes took larger shape and more misty and majestic proportions; and in this congenial air, the Colonel seemed even to himself to expand into something large and mysterious.  If he respected himself before, he almost worshipped Beriah Sellers now, as a superior being.  If he could have chosen an official position out of the highest, he would have been embarrassed in the selection.  The presidency of the republic seemed too limited and cramped in the constitutional restrictions.  If he could have been Grand Llama of the United States, that might have come the nearest to his idea of a position.  And next to that he would have luxuriated in the irresponsible omniscience of the Special Correspondent.

Col.  Sellers knew the President very well, and had access to his presence when officials were kept cooling their heels in the Waiting-room.  The President liked to hear the Colonel talk, his voluble ease was a refreshment after the decorous dullness of men who only talked business and government, and everlastingly expounded their notions of justice and the distribution of patronage.  The Colonel was as much a lover of farming and of horses as Thomas Jefferson was.  He talked to the President by the hour about his magnificent stud, and his plantation at Hawkeye, a kind of principality—­he represented it.  He urged the President to pay him a visit during the recess, and see his stock farm.