Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1886-08-06
r,,end,y Advice to the President.
HUDSON, Wis, June 3,

0eTlQ, YOU uaNc
fnlly become n married man. While l
cannot agree with you politically, Grover,
/ nm forced to admire your courage.
This morning a new life opens out to you
the life Of a married man. 1t is indeed a
humiliating situation. To be a President
of the United States, the r%oustabout of a
free people, is a trying situation; but to be
a newly married President, married in the
full glare of official life, with the eye OF a
divided constituency upon you. IS to place
yourself where nerve is absolutely essen
tial.
L, too, am married, but not under such
trying circumstances. Others have been
married and still lived, but it has re-
manned for you, Mr.. President, young as
you are, to pose as a newly wedded Presl-
into the Cabinet with you. For this rea-
son, 1 say freely that to walk a slack rope
across the moist brow of Niagara and carry
a nervous man in a wheelbarrow sinks into
a mere commonplace. Daniel playing "tag"
with q denful of half starved lions becomes
an historic cipher, and the Hebrew chill
dren, sitting or a rosy bed of red-hot
clinkers in the fiery furnace, are almost for
gotten.
With a large wad of civil service wedged
in among your back teeth, a larger frag-
ment, perhaps, than you were prepared to
masticate when you bit it off; with IN ago.
nized Southern Democracy and a clamorous
Northern constituency; with ~disappoint-
ment poorly concealed among your friends
and hilarity openly expressed by your enc
Davis, who was al one time a sort of Presi-
dent himself, as he rolls up future majori-
ties for your foes; with a lot of sharp-witted
journalists walking all over you every
twenty-four hours, and climbing up your
stalwart frame with their telegraph-repair
boots IN, l am surprised, Grover, honestly,
as between man and man, that you should
have tried to add housekeeping to all this
other agony. Had youbeen young and ten
der under the wings I might have UNDER
stood it; but you must admit, in the quiet
and sanctity Of your own home, Grover, that
you are no gosling. You have arrived at
mans estate. You have climbed the barbed-
wire fence which separates the fluff and
bloom and blossom and bumble-bees of i'm
p%etuous youth from the yellow fields and
shadowy orchards of middle life. You now
stand in the full glare of life's meridian.
You are entering upon q new experience.
Possibly you think that because you are
President the annoyance peculiar to the
life of a new, green groom will not reach
you. Do not fool yourself in this manner.
Others have made thes same mistake. Posi-
ton, wealth, and fame cannot shut out the
awkward and trying circumstances which
attend the married man even as the sparks
are prone to fly upward.
1t will seem odd toyou at first, Mr.. Presi-
dent, after the affairs of the nation have
been put aside for the day and the Govern
ment hre-proof safe locked up for the night,
to go up to your boudoir md converse with
a bride with one corner of her mouth full
OF pins. A man may write a pretty fair
message to Congress, one that will be ac-
cepted and printed all over the country, and
yet he may not be fitted to hold a CONVERSE
ton with n corner of o woman's mouth
while the other is filled with pins. To some
men it is given to be great as statesmen,
while to others it is given to be fluent con-
v~ersationalists under these circumstances.
MIR. President, l may be taking q great
liberty in writing to you and touching upon
your private affairs, but I noticed that
everybody else was doing it, and so I have
nerved myself up to write to you, having
once been a married man myself, though
not, as I said, under the same circum-
STANCES. When I was married 1 was only a
plain justice of the peace, plodding quietly
along and striving to do my duty. You
was then sheriff of your county. Little did
we think in those days that now you would
w - AASoAAy AAAAACo L Oo1uCuU hAu L luo
author of several pieces which nave been
printed in the papers. Little did we think
then, when 1 was a justice of the peace in
Wyoming and you a sheriff in New York,
that to-day your timothy lawn would be
kicked all to pieces by your admiring con-
stituents, while Iwould be known and loved
wherever the English language is tempered
with.
So we have risen together, you to a point
from which you may be easily observed
and fayed alive by the newspapers, while I
am the same pleasant, unassuming, gentle
manly friend of the poor that 1 was when
only a Justice of the Peace and compare
lively unknown.
l cannot close this letter without express
ing a wish that your married life may be a
joyous one, as the paper at Laramie has
said, land chat no cloud may ever come to
mai the horizon of YOU welded bliss"
(This sentence is not my own. I copy it
verbatim from q wedding notice of my own
written by a Western journalist who is now
at the Old Woman's Honey
MIR: President, I hope you will not feel
that l have been too forward in writing to
to do what is best for you. You can truly
say that al I have ever done in this way
has been for your good. 1 speak in a plain
way sometimes, but 1 don't beat about the
bush. I see that you do not want to have
any engrossed bills sent to you for a couple
of weeks.
That's the way I was. I told all nv
creditors to withhold their engrossed bills
during my honeymoon, as I was otherwise
engrossed. This remark made me a great
many friends and added to my large circle
of creditors. 1t was afterward printed in a
foreign paper and explained in a supple
ment of eight pages.
We are all pretty we'll here ct home. /
may go to Washington his fall if I can sell
a block of stock in the Pauper's Dream. a
rich gold claim of mine in Elk Mountain.
1t is a very rich claim, but needs capital to
develop it. (This remark is not original
with me. I quote from IN e~xchange.)
II l do come over to Washington do not
let that make any difference in your plans.
II l thought your wife would send out to
the neighbors and borrow dishes and such
things on my account 1 would not 90 a
step. o."
Remember that I have not grown cold
toward you Just because you have mar.
RED. You will find me the kind of q friend
who will not desert you just when YOU are
IN trouble. Yours, as heretofore,