To-day the President, loafing into my room, picked up a
paper and read the Richmond Examiner’s recent attack on Jeff. Davis. It amused
him. “Why,” said he, “the Examiner seems about as fond of Jeff as the World
is of me.”
. . . . E. Lyulph Stanley, son of Lord Stanley, has been
here for a week. I took him over to Arlington and showed him the African. He
asked more questions than I ever dreamed of in similar circumstances. He
applied a drastic suction to every contraband he met with, and came back with
brain and note-book crammed with instructive miscellany. He has been exhausting
everybody in the same way, till his coming is dreaded like that of the
schoolmaster by his idle flock. He is a most intelligent gentleman — courteous
and ready — a contrast to most Englishmen in his freedom from conceit and
prejudice.
He leaves town to-day. I gave him my autograph book; we
exchanged Cartes “like two young shepherds, very friendly and pastoral.”
SOURCES: Clara B. Hay, Letters of John Hay and
Extracts from Diary, Volume 1, p. 180-1. See Michael Burlingame & John R.
Turner Ettlinger, Editors, Inside Lincoln's White House: The Complete
Civil War Diary of John Hay, p. 188 for the full diary entry.
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