Sallie Ward, in deference perhaps to the prejudices of her French origin, was sent to a school presided over by a woman of that nationality. She enlivened its atmosphere of conventional elegance by many startling ebullitions of her undisciplined young spirits, such as appearing unannounced in male attire at wholly inappropriate moments. Then, as everybody disappeared with more haste than dignity, her own uncontrollable laughter would reveal the truth of the situation. Some one would exclaim, "Sallie Ward!" and the others would troop back to admire her, for, if a little effeminate, she made, nevertheless, a very captivating youth, and no school-mistress could ever look into her beaming face and find it in her heart to be harsh to her.

Her own mother attempted once when she was a very little child to punish her for some misdemeanor, but Sallie, divining her purpose, dropped quickly on her knees and raised her little hands in supplication. There seemed at that moment something so seraphic in her childish beauty that her mother afterwards admitted that her good intentions were involuntarily thwarted. Though the rod was always spared, she grew up to be none the less lovable, though a woman of the world in all things rather than a woman of the spirit,—the logical result of her environment.

A subtle quality that goes forth from some personalities, commanding instant attention and reverence, went forth from Sallie Ward, evoking everywhere admiration and love. She realized the power herself, and it enabled her to do everything with an indefinable grace proceeding from an absolute self-confidence. That which would have seemed daring coming from another woman was approved and applauded in Sallie Ward. She possessed a knowledge of horses that is more or less common among the women of Kentucky, and rode with a dash and skill which the women of no other State have ever surpassed. She sometimes capriciously utilized this accomplishment to test a man's devotion, doing apparently without premeditation some daring feat and discovering thereby the extent to which he would follow her, for every man was at least worth measuring weapons with, though in the process she unwittingly, no doubt, despoiled many a less dazzling woman. She was, however, only exercising what she conceived to be the prerogative of every woman. While riding in Louisville one day she came upon the market-house, which ran for some distance through the centre of the street. Instead of going around it, she impulsively dashed through it without in any degree slackening her speed. The man who was with her unhesitatingly followed, and was rewarded, as he drew up beside her on emerging from the far end of the structure, with an arch smile and "Now, sir, you'll have a pretty fine to pay, twenty-five dollars apiece, for that little stretch." When he went the next day, however, to pay the penalty for the pretty caprice, he found that the obligation had already been quietly discharged by Miss Ward herself.

She had innumerable lovers and suitors all her life, and never, even in its closing years, entered any assemblage, small or great, private or public, that her name did not pass from mouth to mouth till all were aware of her presence. She was the glorious heroine of many a shy girl's first ball, while the forlorn little maid whom it purported to introduce to the social world clung timidly to the wall, with admiring eyes, however paradoxical it may seem, upon the radiant being who with apparent unconsciousness was carrying off all the honors of the occasion. The remarkable popularity of Sallie Ward has been compared to that of a feudal princess in her hereditary domain. It was confined to no class, but entered into all grades of society, parents in all walks of life naming their children after her, and children in turn naming their pets after her. Many a product of the far-famed stock-farms of the blue-grass State was likewise honored with a name that came to be a synonyme for all excellence. "It is a perfect Sallie Ward," or, "I've a regular Sallie Ward," was the proud boast of many a man who owned anything whatsoever that he esteemed of superlative quality.

A mother once putting her little girl to bed related to her as a lullaby the story of the creation of the world, pointing out its beauties and blessings as they came from the hand of God.

"He made the sun that shines in the day," said the mother, "and the moon and the stars that we see in the night, and all the flowers that beautify the world, and the birds that gladden it with their sweet song."

"And mother, don't forget," interrupted the child. "He made Sallie Ward, too."

When the governor of Kentucky, at the outbreak of the Mexican War, was called upon to furnish a regiment of infantry, both the Louisville Legion and the Louisville Guard, among whose officers and men were enrolled many names of which the State was justly proud, volunteered for service. Sallie Ward was selected to present the flags to both companies, and the enthusiasm of the people, when on the bright May morning of their departure the Legion passed in review before her home, testified to the concurrence of the entire city in the choice. There was a prolonged shout of rapture from the throng of spectators as many eyes dim with weeping beheld the already familiar form of Sallie Ward standing beneath the silken folds of her country's flag. Their cheers redoubled as she presented it to the standard-bearer, and they continued to ring in her ears as she waved her own farewell to the embryo heroes, many of whom carried away that last picture of her standing in the sunshine of that bright morning to be an inspiration in a darker hour. She drove to Portland to present the flag to the Guards, who embarked from that point. As they marched by the open carriage in which she sat at the conclusion of the ceremony of the presentation, every man saluted her, and she afterwards declared that it was the proudest moment in a life of many triumphs.

Her father's wealth not only enabled him to maintain one of the most elaborate establishments in Louisville, but in the summer to transport his numerous family, accompanied by men- and maid-servants, in travelling-carriages to the White Sulphur Springs, where his daughters were successively belles. A portion of each winter, including the season of the Mardi Gras, was spent in New Orleans, for though the facilities for travelling that exist to-day were not known at that time, a man blessed with the worldly goods that Mr. Ward possessed could not only permit his family to make frequent journeys, but to make them also under most comfortable and agreeable circumstances.

In this way the fame of Sallie Ward was well established at the South when, before she had reached her twentieth year, she married Bigelow Lawrence, of Boston, and entered upon her brief career at the North. The man who thus won her from many Southern rivals was many years her senior, and it was to a woman of her temperament a most unfortunate alliance. He was the son of the Hon. Abbott Lawrence, who had been our minister to England, and was himself a man of wealth and distinction and an exquisite gentleman of the severe Boston school, whose ethics were wholly at variance with that spirit of liberality which was all Sallie Ward had hitherto known. Developed in an atmosphere of almost passionate admiration, love and appreciation had become as necessary to her being as light and air. Transplanted in the very effulgence of her bloom to a frigid temperature of critical and unsympathetic surroundings, all her spontaneous grace congealed into acts of deliberate effrontery. Bewildered by a chill she had never before felt, too young and inexperienced in the ways of the world beyond those of her own genial climate, where she had been a law unto herself, to realize aught of the value of mutual concessions, she struck blindly against the cold conventionality in which she felt herself encaged. It was a strange and almost cruel fate that put her in the bosom of the Lawrence family, and occasioned as much suffering to her Southern heart as to their Northern sensibilities.

At a ball given in Boston about the time Mrs. Bloomer was seeking to introduce her reform in woman's dress, and while the subject was being widely discussed. Sallie Ward, then the wife of Bigelow Lawrence, appeared in a costume designed on the Bloomer pattern. Socially conservative Boston was agog, and Lawrence achieved through his wife an unenviable notoriety. Another of her proclivities wrought additional sensation and consequently further havoc in his social status. Notwithstanding the natural beauty of her complexion, it was whispered even in Louisville that she sought with more or less artistic skill to further embellish it. One day when the artifice was unusually apparent, as she passed a group of laboring men, one exclaimed, audibly, "By God, painted!" Nothing daunted and without changing color, the story runs, she said, quietly, "Yes, painted by God," and passed on.

Her mother, realizing the unhappy condition of her life with Mr. Lawrence, took her home, and within a year she applied to the Legislature of Kentucky for a divorce, which was granted on the ground of incompatibility of temper. She took her maiden name and lived for several years in retirement.

Her first reappearance in that world of gayety and social emulation which was her natural element was at a ball given in Louisville, and where at midnight, though everybody knew she was in the house, she had not yet made her appearance. Shortly after twelve o'clock the music suddenly ceased; in an instant silence fell upon the ball-room; some one whispered "Sallie Ward," and every one pressed towards the stairway. She was, indeed, a vision of radiant loveliness that held every man and woman spellbound as she descended its winding length. She was enveloped in white tulle, which seemed to float about her like a cloud, a jewelled pin catching the meshes of a filmy veil and holding it imprisoned in her brown hair. One arm covered with jewelled bracelets was extended, the hand resting in that of the man who had the honor of leading her. So light and floating was the effect she produced that the tips of her white slippers seemed scarcely to touch the steps.

She was at all times supreme and irresistible without resorting to extraordinary effects, which she frequently did, for she was not lacking in that vanity which is "the cordial drop," said John Adams, "that makes the bitter cup of life go down," though an existence filled with so many sweets as was hers could have needed no such stimulus.

At a fancy-dress ball given in her honor at Lexington, she created an unparalleled sensation by changing her costume four times in the course of the evening, reaching the climax as an houri.

Her second marriage was to Dr. Hunt, of New Orleans, where she was already well known. The city, with its contingent of wealthy Spanish and French planters, contained many homes whose palatial splendors exceeded those of the most pretentious establishments of other localities. The new home in which Sallie Ward came to preside was on a scale of magnificence that fully gratified her luxurious tastes and love of the beautiful. Its rich adornment of tapestries, statuary, and Parisian furnishings, its marble court, with its glistening fountains and wealth of tropical bloom, formed an exquisite background for her artistic individuality and prodigal temperament. Its hospitalities were munificent and the legend of the magnificence of its dinner-parties, during which the orchestra from the French opera filled the court-yard and dining-room with its melodies, was the marvel of a people accustomed to entertaining with all the luxurious accompaniments of a most artistic civilization; and into all of whose forms of a ceremonious existence there entered a perfect harmony that was a second nature to them.

The years of her residence in New Orleans represent the most brilliant period of Sallie Ward's life, when her surroundings, combined with her natural gifts, gave her easily that leading position which she filled so graciously and with so much happiness to herself. Her only child, Mr. John Hunt, of New York, was born of this marriage.

After her husband's death she returned to Louisville, and there for some years devoted herself to rearing and educating her son. She was subsequently twice married, the first time, after nearly fifteen years of widowhood, to Mr. Vene P. Armstrong, and the second time to Mr. George F. Downs, both of Kentucky. She retained till the end of her life, which closed in the summer of 1898, all her remarkable powers of attraction.

Surrounded always with the pomp and vanity of life, and deeply imbued with the maxims of a worldly philosophy, she yet preserved intact an unselfish heart that not only prompted her to many deeds of noble philanthropy, but to countless little acts of kindness graciously performed that beautified lives less fortunate than her own. With her quick bright mind and gift for clever repartee, she sent many a ripple of irresistible drollery over the current of the life that encircled her, and sped many a shaft of stinging wit into the armor of a hollow conventionality. "How lovely of you to say that! but then you always say such sweet things of everybody," was the meaningless flattery in the response of a woman to whom she had spoken in heartfelt praise of another woman. "Did you ever hear, madam," retorted Mrs. Downs, "that I had said anything sweet of you?"

She never could have attracted and held the universal homage that was undoubtedly hers had there not radiated from her a power quite beyond that bestowed by the material possessions of the world,—the potency of a vivid and lovable personality. Had she been a man, she would have been capable of such acts of gallantry and daring as characterized "mad" Anthony Wayne or General Custer. As she was a woman, with her field restricted to the social world, from whose stand-point she must necessarily, therefore, be judged, her singular genius was productive of many extraordinary achievements, through all of which there was a very audible appeal for the love that never failed her, but which was given to her in such measure as perhaps to no other woman ever born in America.

HARRIET LANE
(MRS. HENRY ELLIOTT JOHNSTON)

Of the men who have filled the Presidential chair of the United States, about none as about James Buchanan has romance hung that halo which in his case tends but to throw into bolder relief the substantial side of his character. Men of more dash, of more picturesque individuality have filled that high office than was he who rose to it through the gradations of a long legislative career.

When he entered Congress, though he was but twenty-nine years old, the chapter of sentiment had already closed for him, and it was never reopened during a long life, the greater part of which was passed in the gaze of a scrutinizing public. This fact alone is sufficient to render him unique in the estimation of a people who have a primitive love for the story where all ends happily.

There was nothing in Buchanan's appearance nor in his attitude towards life in general that suggested the tragic episode of his youth. It is only in retrospect that we realize the glamour it cast over his subsequent years. Nature reacts through various channels, and in him she sought her outlet in an unabating mental activity. He was a student all his life.

To the world he was a man of somewhat grave appearance, a typical anglo-saxon, immaculate in his dress, conservative in his speech, and yet with a grace and dignity of manner that added much to the distinction with which he represented his country at the court of Russia in 1832, and again twenty-one years later at the court of St. James.

His attitude towards women was that of chivalric regard, and the close relationship he bore to one of the most beautiful women of her period, being both her uncle and guardian, displays one of the most interesting sides of his character. Much of the charm that attaches to the history of the more conspicuous years of his public career emanates from Harriet Lane. No woman has ever presided in the White House who roused so universal an interest, unless it was Mrs. Cleveland, as did Buchanan's niece.

Her countrymen honored her in every conceivable way, and her name was a household word. Vessels of war and of peace bore it to foreign shores. Clubs, streets, houses, and even articles of dress were named after her.

There was a majestic isolation about both Harriet Lane and James Buchanan. Death had stripped them both,—Buchanan in his youth of the woman who might have rounded out his life, and Harriet Lane, one by one, of mother, father, sister, and brothers. She came into the White House bearing the burden of personal loss in the recent death of her only sister. As she came out of it the travail of coming war had already cast its shadow upon the nation.

Yet, socially, the White House was never so brilliant as it was during the administration of Buchanan. "The White House," said Jefferson Davis, referring later to his last days in Washington, "under the administration of Buchanan approached more nearly to my idea of a republican court than the President's house had ever done before, or since the days of Washington."

A picture that the people seemed never to tire of looking upon was of the grave bachelor-President with his beautiful niece beside him doing the honors of the nation. She was at the climax of her glorious womanhood during the period she passed in the White House. Contact with the world, together with her recent touch of sorrow, had worn away the angles of her youthful exuberance. She had attained a golden maturity, and with a perfection of physical development she united a dignity and a confidence in herself restful to behold. "Every motion," Mary Clemmer wrote of her at that time, "was instinct with life, health, and intelligence. Her head and features were cast in noble mould, and her form, which at rest had something of the massive majesty of a marble pillar, in motion was instinct alike with power and grace."

She had a warmth of coloring that further bore out the idea of abundant health. Her hair was of a golden-brown hue, and worn always with that absolute simplicity which best became her well-shaped head. Her eyes were of a deep violet and her mouth was faultlessly beautiful, with its full red lips and upward curve.

She was as discreet, said one of her admiring critics, as she was beautiful, and her uncle's confidence in her was without bounds. Even as a little child, when falling far short in many respects of his somewhat austere ideals of propriety, she had inspired in him a reverence for her absolute truthfulness. "She never told a lie," he once said, in speaking of her childhood; "she had a soul above deceit or fraud. She was too proud for it."

She came into Buchanan's life like a breath of wind from the mountain-side, fresh, sweet, and wild. Buchanan was distraught. His bachelor habitat was in confusion. He was a man of theories and ideals. This bit of youthful life that had elected to invade the quiet of his days was a being of impulse, however generous, of exuberant health and spirits. A sense of his superiority, however, penetrating her youthful intelligence, gave him that influence over her that was productive of such satisfactory results as she grew to womanhood.

Through her father, Elliot Lane, whose family had emigrated to Virginia during the war of the American Revolution, she was of English descent. From the north of Ireland, about the same time, also had come her maternal grandfather, James Buchanan. He married Elizabeth Spear, the daughter of a farmer, and settled in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, then and for some years later central ground and the great highway between the East and the West. James Buchanan, afterwards President of his country, and Jane, the mother of Harriet Lane, were the first two children born of this marriage.

Harriet Lane, the youngest of four children, became an orphan in her tenth year. She attached herself voluntarily to her already distinguished uncle, who was at the time in the United States Senate, having but recently returned from Russia, where he had negotiated our first commercial treaty with that country.

Somewhat abashed though duly touched by the honor conferred upon him by his ardent little kinswoman, he undertook the novel responsibility of her upbringing with such misgivings as he had never been conscious of when accepting the various high honors bestowed upon him by his country. She quitted the home in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where she was born, and her uncle's home, Wheatland, became thenceforth hers. It was a roomy old brick house with ample grounds, on East King Street, in Lancaster, one of the old colonial towns of Pennsylvania.

It has been said, in no matter how many places we may live, there is only one that is home to us. Wheatland was that to Harriet Lane, though she was destined to see much of the world and to spend years at a time away from its tranquil seclusion. Its improvement and adornment were ever matters of keen interest to her. There she first attracted an admiration which gradually extended over her own country and England, for the fame of Harriet Lane was international. There she had possession of her uncle, it being their custom to spend their mornings together, usually in reading the newspapers, she incidentally absorbing his statesmanlike view of the political questions of the day.

Buchanan frequently entertained at Wheatland both his political friends and those he had made through his diplomatic relations. His niece was a truly bewitching hostess on these occasions, to which there often attached much that was brilliant.

The first attempt at training after she passed under her uncle's care was not a happy one in the estimation of his young ward. Being obliged to go to Washington for the session of Congress, he closed his home at Lancaster and transferred his ménage to the capital, for Buchanan always set up his household gods wherever he tarried for any length of time, his housekeeper, Miss Hetty Parker, who served him in that capacity for forty years, going with him from place to place. Harriet was left in Lancaster, in the home of some venerable spinsters of her uncle's acquaintance, who had pronounced ideas on the moral gait to be maintained by the rising generation. From her own accounts, given in letters to her uncle, she seems to have been frequently disciplined by means of her healthy young appetite. There were melodramatic occasions when she went without sugar in her tea, and was compelled to practise various similar mortifications of the flesh for which no small girl has a natural bent. After she was removed from these uncongenial surroundings she lived for some time in dread of an adverse circumstance that might return her to them. Her uncle, on whom neither the pathos nor the humor of the situation was lost, more than once suggested quizzically in his letters to her that she might like to go back to the old ladies.

When they were separated he wrote to her every day, at first from conscientious motives of the duty he owed to her, and later because of the pleasure he derived from this frequent interchange of thought and sympathy. When she was twelve years old he sent her with her sister, Mary, to boarding-school at Charlestown, West Virginia.

"Had Mary written to me that you were a good girl and had behaved yourself entirely well, I should have visited you during the Christmas holidays," he said, in the course of a letter written to her shortly after her initiation into boarding-school life.

In 1845 Buchanan became Secretary of State under President Polk. "My labors are great," he wrote to Harriet, shortly after entering upon the duties of his new office, "but they do not 'way' me down, as you write the word. Now I would say 'weigh,' but doctors may differ on this point." Further on in the same letter he continues thus: "Your friends, Mrs. Bancroft [wife of the Secretary of War] and the Pleasantons often inquire for you. They have given you somewhat of a name here, and Mrs. Polk and Miss Rucker, her niece, have several times urged me to permit you to come and pass some time with them. I have been as deaf as the adder to their request, knowing, to use a word of your grandmother, that you are too 'outsetting' already. There is a time for all things under the sun, as the wise man says, and your time will yet come." Again, he sends love from Miss Hetty, his housekeeper, and a message to the effect that she would be glad to see Harriet in Washington. "I fear she might be twice glad," added Buchanan, "once on your arrival and still more so on your departure."

It was Buchanan's custom to spend his summers or a portion of them at Bedford Springs, taking his nieces with him. To the younger it has ever been a place of happy memories. There, when she was still quite a young girl, she met the man, then also full of all the enthusiasm of youth, to whom, after exacting a prolonged devotion, she finally surrendered herself.

In one of her uncle's letters written to her in the summer of 1846 he tells her he will not be able to go to Bedford before the 10th of August, "when the season will be over and it will be too late for Mary to enact the character of belle; and you," he continued, "are quite too young to make the attempt."

He placed her, the autumn of that year, in the Visitation Convent, in Georgetown, whence she was graduated three years later with much distinction. She passed one Sunday in every month during these three years at her uncle's home on F Street, there catching her first glimpse of that world of which she was later to form a part. Her uncle was still Secretary of State, and his home was frequented by the most illustrious men who made up the public life of that day. There Harriet, looking upon herself as a full-fledged young lady, spent the first winter after her liberation from school duties. The following year, however, she passed quietly among her relatives in Pennsylvania, which was more in accord with her uncle's wishes, for she was still very young. The decision to do so was entirely voluntary on her part, which pleased Buchanan greatly, for he realized fully what a fascination the gay life of the capital held for a young girl in her high social position. He wrote her a letter full of praise for controlling what he knew to be her inclination and remaining at home. "This act of self-restraint has raised you in my estimation," he wrote, and then went on to relate frankly how gay the city was, and concluded by assuring her that Mr. John Sullivan, an Irish gentleman famous for his dinners, would be inconsolable when he learned that she was not to be there that winter.

It is supposed that no American woman ever had more offers of marriage than Harriet Lane, and it is evident, from a letter written her by her uncle about this time, that suitors had already begun to present themselves. "I wish now to give you a caution," he wrote: "never allow your affections to become interested, or engage yourself to any person, without my previous advice. You ought never to marry any person who is not able to afford you a decent and immediate support. In my experience I have witnessed the long years of patient misery and dependence which fine women have endured from rushing precipitately into matrimonial connections without sufficient reflection. Look ahead and consider the future, and act wisely in this particular."

With the incoming of Taylor's administration Buchanan retired to Wheatland, spending the ensuing four years there with occasional sallies to Washington and his summers as usual at Bedford Springs.

Harriet Lane was already a belle of far more than local repute when in 1852, her uncle having been appointed minister to England, she accompanied him thither.

Through the effect she produced in a strange land Buchanan probably for the first time fully realized how unusually beautiful she was. So favorable was the impression she made upon the queen that on state occasions she was assigned to places usually given only to the wives of ambassadors and ministers. She was well known throughout England, and on the day that Oxford University conferred the degree of Doctor of Civil Laws upon her uncle and Alfred Tennyson its ancient walls rang with the cheers that went up from its hundreds of students who rose en masse to greet the entrance of Harriet Lane.

"She was a most distinguished young person," said one of her countrymen recently, growing enthusiastic over the recollection of the impression she created, "whom more than one Englishman would have given his head to marry."

Her beauty was not less appreciated by the artistic eye of the French people, and Mr. James Edward MacFarland, who was secretary of the American legation at the time of her visit to the family of Mr. John Y. Mason, then our minister to France, was full of anecdotes of the naïveté with which the people in the streets of Paris were wont to express their admiration.

Shortly after her return to America the loss of her only sister, Mrs. George W. Baker, who died in California, sent Harriet Lane into deep mourning. While the country was filled with stories of her beauty and the impression it had created in foreign capitals she was passing her days in the grateful quiet of Wheatland. Her uncle's nomination to the Presidency but added to her fame, the campaign, election, and inauguration bringing her gradually into that eminent position she was so admirably fitted to fill. At the ball attending the inaugural ceremonies at Washington she made her first reappearance in public, clad, as best became her noble form, in the simplicity of a white dress, flower trimmed, and with a necklace of pearls.

In those days, before social functions had attained the proportions that now characterize them, they reflected in the White House, as elsewhere, more of the individuality of the host and hostess than is now possible. Many details that are now consigned to secretaries and stewards then appertained to the master and mistress of the house. Harriet Lane and her cousin James Buchanan Henry, who acted as private secretary to his uncle, invariably arranged the seating of the guests at state dinners, an onerous task now performed by an under-secretary of the Executive Mansion, who, besides being familiar with the rules of official precedence, must also know something of the social relationship each guest bears to his possible neighbor. She made no mistakes, for she had been trained to her position as had none of her predecessors, unless we except the wives of the two Adamses.

In 1860, when the Prince of Wales visited England's North American possessions, on President Buchanan's suggestion and invitation, he extended his travels so as to include at least a portion of the United States. The memory of his sojourn among us still lives in many of the cities and towns whose territory had once formed part of the kingdom of his ancestors. The five days he spent in Washington were passed in the White House. A guest of the nation at the capital is usually assigned to a suite of rooms in one of the hotels of the city. Between Buchanan and the Prince of Wales, however, owing to the former's recent residence at the court of St. James, there existed more of a personal feeling than is usual between the President and state guests.

In all the festivities by which the Executive Mansion did honor to his presence the unerring hand and faultless taste of Harriet Lane were evident.

One memorable day of his visit was spent at Mount Vernon. The revenue cutter "Harriet Lane" was selected to take the distinguished little party, consisting of the President, Miss Lane, the Prince, his suite, and the British Minister down the river. The simplicity of George Washington's home and the picturesque beauty of its situation were themes of interesting study to the Englishmen. At his tomb they reverently bared their heads, and near it the Prince planted a tree in remembrance of the day.

After he left Washington he wrote to the President expressing his appreciation of the hospitality he had received, and sending him his portrait painted by Sir John Watson Gordon, with a set of engravings of the Royal family for Miss Lane, to whom now also belong the portrait and the letter, together with one written by the queen. It echoes the gratification already expressed by her son concerning the kindliness of his reception among the American people, and shows in what high regard she personally held both the President and his niece.

Buchanan's administration was the last of the old régime, a period in which there had been that unity of purpose that had fostered the nation, that wise forbearance that had preserved it, and withal much of illustrious oratory and brilliant debate. But the parting of the ways had come. A day of action was at hand. Buchanan, oppressed with a sense of his impotency to avert a crisis that was inevitable, retired to Wheatland, and Lincoln, full of high purposes and many misgivings, stepped into the pathway of destiny. Upon the one public life instantly relaxed its hold, while about the other it threw its myriad feverish tendrils, clutching him hourly closer to itself till the long watches of that fatal April night, during which its imperious tenure was loosened by death.

With Buchanan, Harriet Lane also passed from the horizon of public life, spending with him at Wheatland those historic four years that followed her days in the White House. There, in January, 1866, she was married to Henry Elliott Johnston, of Baltimore. The ceremony was performed by her uncle, the Rev. Edward Y. Buchanan, of the Episcopal Church.

Her honeymoon she passed in Cuba and her married life in Baltimore, in whose social doings she took a prominent part. At her uncle's death, in 1868, she inherited Wheatland, where for a number of years she passed her summers. In 1892 she bought a home in Washington, where she now spends the greater part of her time.

Much has been given her of life's joys and triumphs, and much, too, of its sorrows. Death has repeatedly crossed the threshold of her home, robbing her, one by one, of her heart's treasures: in 1881 the elder of her two sons, James Buchanan Johnston, a boy of brilliant promise, then in his fourteenth year; in 1882 her second son, Henry Elliott Johnston; and two years later her husband. Surrounded not only by life's comforts, but its elegancies, by friends of her own and a succeeding generation, there is yet about Harriet Lane Johnston to-day much of that same majestic isolation that marked her youth.

ADÈLE CUTTS
(MRS. ROBERT WILLIAMS)

During the four years that Franklin Pierce presided over the nation so many beautiful women came prominently before the public at the capital that his was called the "beauty administration." Many were the wives and daughters of men in high official position, but the fame of none exceeded that of the daughter of James Madison Cutts, who held the office of Second Controller of the Treasury.

Born within a stone's throw of the White House, all her young days centred about it, and how near she came to living there as the wife of a President we may gauge by how near Stephen A. Douglas came to possessing that office. Adèle Cutts flourished in that truly golden era before material wealth became a necessary adjunct to a woman's popularity, when men were distinguished by a greater spirit of gallantry and disinterestedness, and in the days before a belle's powers at a watering-place were rated by the number or size of the trunks she took with her; in a word, in the days when the woman herself was pre-eminent and the accident of worldly possessions secondary.

It was recently said of a wealthy American girl, who, though she has generously expended much of her large fortune in the endowment of seats of learning and similar public benefactions, has yet in herself none of that magnetism that would entitle her to enrollment among the great belles of her country, "Yes, she is a great belle this summer. She brought thirty trunks, and she dresses six times a day." At the same resort forty years ago, Adèle Cutts, remarkable for the simplicity of her toilettes even among a generation that had no conception whatever of the elaborate costuming of women which marks the close of the century, was the most renowned of its belles.

While she derived in the preliminary stages of her social career some prestige from her connection with two of the most illustrious families not only of Virginia but of the entire country,—Washington and Madison,—she attained while yet a very young woman a pre-eminence by reason of her beauty, the distinction of her bearing, and a genuine loveliness of character, which reflected as much honor upon the somewhat remote relationship as it had bestowed upon her. She was born in the home of her grandfather, Richard Cutts, who, in the days when Maine was part of Massachusetts, had for twelve years represented in the Congress of the United States that district which at this end of the century was for so long a period associated with the name of Thomas B. Reed.

In 1804 Richard Cutts married Anna Payne, the youngest sister of the famous Dolly Payne, who some years before had become the wife of James Madison. Still another sister had married George Steptoe Washington, the nephew of our first President. It was of her sister Anna's family that Mistress Dolly wrote her lines adapted from John Gilpin's ride:

The home Cutts built for his bride, and where his children and grandchildren were born, was in those early days one of the pretentious houses of the capital. It overlooked Lafayette Square, and its beautiful garden, where Addie Cutts played as a little girl, skirted along H street to the end of the block. Cutts was a widower when his son James Madison married Miss Ellen O'Neale, of Maryland, and took her to "Montpelier" to spend their honeymoon days with his aunt and uncle, whose namesake he was. On their return to Washington his bride became the mistress of her father-in-law's home, where in the following year, 1835, Adèle Cutts was born.

In the guise of a little flower-girl she made her first formal appearance at the White House when she was but seven years old, at a children's fancy ball given there in 1842 during the administration of President Tyler.

She was for the most part educated at Madame Burr's school, in the city in which she was born. Her wonderful grace of manner, however, was not the result of education; it was the manifestation of a character beautiful by nature and developed amid happy surroundings. An only daughter, she was the close companion of her beautiful and brilliant mother, besides spending much of her time until her fifteenth year with her great-aunt Madison, whose genius had sown the first seeds of social life in the barren wastes of the national capital and drawn together the scattered elements of its subsequent levees and dinner-parties. After the death of Madison, finding herself unable to support the solitude of her life at "Montpelier," which had been theretofore most complete and happy, she returned to Washington and took up her home in the Cutts house, which now belonged to her and which bears her name to this day, though it has had many other distinguished occupants. Richard Cutts had mortgaged it to Madison, and dying before he had repaid him, the house passed into the possession of Mrs. Madison. There she held a court as brilliant as any ever presided over by an American woman, and Adèle Cutts was early familiarized with the greatness of a generation that was already passing away. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, as well as every President of the United States whose term of office fell during her residence in Washington, paid her the tribute of frequent visits, and felt honored by his privilege to do so.

At the time of her death her great-niece was fourteen years old, and already possessed a beauty of the purest Greek type, whose stateliness increased as she advanced towards womanhood. The faultless outline of her profile, the shapeliness of her head, her large, dark eyes, her chestnut hair that showed glints of a golden hue in the sunshine, the creamy tone of her skin, the perfect proportion and development of her tall figure, all combined to make the rare beauty of a personality whose charm was augmented twofold by her own unconsciousness of its rich possessions.

Like many girls of southern proclivities, she spent her summers at that famous old resort that has witnessed the rising and going down of so many social stars, the White Sulphur Springs. There, dressed always in white, with a white kerchief in the mornings folded across her bosom and showing her fair throat, there was about her a freshness and simplicity that suggested her descent from the Quaker Paynes.

The spirit of gallantry has no age limit in the South, and she, like many another girl in the blossom of her youth, received the homage of men of all periods of life. The beautiful Imogene Penn, afterwards Mrs. James Lyons, of Richmond, and whose belleship days were contemporaneous with those of Adèle Cutts, encountered the irrepressible Richmond wag, Tom August, one morning as she was returning from the springhouse between two devotees, one of whom was the unsuspected possessor of forty-five, while the other concealed about his person as many as fifty summers. "I thought, Miss Imogene," said August, bowing profoundly to the trio and availing himself of a wit's privilege, "that you were just eighteen, but I see you are between forty-five and fifty."

Some Virginia beaux, who were young then, have treasured up and still relate an anecdote of the manner in which one of Adèle Cutts's elderly admirers lost the only opportunity she ever gave him to propose to her. He came from New Orleans, and was blessed with many good things, including sons and daughters older than Miss Cutts. At a fancy-dress ball she appeared completely disguised in the character of a housekeeper, having borrowed the entire costume, including the cap, apron, and bunch of keys at her side, from the housekeeper of the hotel. Before any one had had an opportunity to speculate on her identity, discovering her old admirer among the spectators of the gay and bewildering scene, she approached demurely and asked him if he did not need a housekeeper. He parried the question somewhat playfully, and ended by answering in the negative. She dropped him a courtesy with a grace no housekeeper could emulate, peeping at him with laughing eyes over her mask, and disappeared in the throng of the ball-room.

At a White House reception, early in the winter of 1856, she met Stephen A. Douglas, who was then prominent as a Presidential possibility; he was also one of the Illinois Senators, and his ringing speeches had won him a national fame equal to the intensity of his local popularity. His able defence of Andrew Jackson on the floor of the Senate so gratified and touched the old President that he preserved a copy of the speech, laying it aside as an inheritance for those who should come after him, and endorsing it as a defence of himself and his administration. The one great fault of that administration, in his own estimation, was none of those for which popular opinion of his day condemned him, but that he had not hanged Calhoun. "Douglas," writes one of his biographers, "had wonderfully magnetic powers, and usually carried his audience with him." It is small wonder, then, that at the end of a few months of ardent and eloquent debate, with an audience consisting of one young girl, that he should have carried her completely with him.

He was a widower with two sons when he met Adèle Cutts, and, like many a less fortunate man, he was instantly impressed with her absolute loveliness. He would go to her direct from the Senate chamber while the whole city was ringing with the fame of his speeches, which she not infrequently heard from a place in the gallery, and throw all his irresistible eloquence into his courtship of her.

In the Democratic Convention of the summer of 1856 Douglas and Buchanan were rival candidates for the Presidential nomination. Pierce, also, though there had been some doubt in the minds of his own townsmen about his making a successful President at all, was seeking the nomination for a second term. "Frank Pierce is all very well up here where he knows everybody and everybody knows Frank Pierce," said a New Hampshire sage during the summer preceding Pierce's election, "but when it comes to spreading him out over the whole country, I'm afraid he'll be mighty thin in some places." The thinness had evidently been apparent, for while he had the high honor of coming in almost unanimously, as Senator Benton said, he went out with as great a unanimity.

When it became evident that the nomination was not for Douglas, so intensely was he beloved by the people of the West, and particularly by those of his own State, that many a sturdy, hard-featured delegate from that section, to all appearances the embodiment of stoicism, put down his head and wept like a little heart-broken child.

On the 20th of November, a few weeks after the election of Buchanan, he was married to Adèle Cutts, and it has been said that, of the many beautiful women who witnessed the incoming of Buchanan's administration at his inaugural ball, Douglas's wife was the most beautiful.

Already known to the South and the East, her fame now spread westward, and when it was rumored that Douglas would take her to Chicago, where he had maintained a legal residence for some years, the people of the town made ready to receive her with the enthusiasm which she inspired in them then primarily as the young wife of Stephen A. Douglas. She made her first appearance among them at St. Mary's Church, where many people who had never been in a Catholic church before were found in the congregation that Sunday morning, and far more than the usual external contingent waited patiently on the sidewalk to see her as she came out. When she appeared with her husband at the celebration held on the State line between Illinois and Wisconsin, in honor of the union of the two railroad companies between Chicago and Milwaukee, she was hailed with uproarious cheers. There was that in her very presence which seemed to completely satisfy every man's ideal of all womanly perfection.

It was in the year of the great contest for the Legislature between Lincoln and Douglas that the people of the West came to know her, however, as she was already known at the East, and to love her with that same loyalty and devotion. Her home in Chicago was always in hotels, sometimes at the Tremont House and again at the Lake View. Many of the men who have made Chicago the queen city she is to-day were then young. Among them were professional men and men full of commercial enterprise, all brainy and ambitious, and a fair number of them Democrats and followers of Douglas. These gathered about her in her parlors or under the trees in the garden overlooking the lake, and though she never entered into any political discussion, the very fact that Douglas possessed such a wife inspired them with renewed ardor for his cause. In her gentle graciousness, infinite tact, and entire unconsciousness of the admiration she everywhere aroused, they felt the full force of her high breeding.

Lincoln and Douglas are so conspicuously identified as political enemies, that few people realize that personally they were friends. Not unfrequently they travelled a whole day together only to take the platform that night against each other and to pommel each other, figuratively, out of recognition. Douglas was adroit, however, and Lincoln once said of him that it was difficult to get the best of him in any debate, because his power of bewildering his audience was so great that they never knew when he was worsted. During the summer in which their political enmity first achieved so much prominence, Douglas's wife went with him through the State winning favor for him in all eyes, even including those of the "ablest whig rascal in all Springfield, Abe Lincoln." He liked to sit beside her as they journeyed from place to place and pour some funny story into her attentive ears, or, perhaps, divining the tender sympathy of her true woman's soul, tell her some incident of his early days, touching off its sorrowful details with a bit of homely philosophy or a stroke of his inexhaustible humor; and as the train pulled into some expectant town, and the two opponents were greeted by factions whose enmity was real, he would say, "Here, Douglas, take your woman," and so they would part to meet again as foes. As the final victory was with Douglas, he and his wife made that tour of the Southern States that was much in the nature of a triumphal procession, and was a forerunner of his Presidential campaign which shortly followed.

His real home was in Washington, where as a Senator he spent the greater portion of each year. There he built a commodious house, with a ball-room, by no means a frequent adjunct at that time, which witnessed much generous hospitality in those difficult days preceding secession, when a woman like Mrs. Douglas could best hold warring elements in abeyance.

The result of the campaign of the summer of 1860, in which Lincoln and Douglas again confronted each other, this time for the higher prize of the Presidency, precipitated that crisis which at length brought these two life-long opponents together in defence of the Union. The whole aim of Douglas's life had been for the Presidency. He had accomplished all else he had ever set his heart upon, and he was so absolutely the idol of the people that it had not seemed possible to him he should fail here. He swallowed the bitterness of his disappointment heroically, however, and was a generous and even a graceful friend to Lincoln.

It is related that, when Lincoln rose to read his inaugural address, he hesitated a moment, uncertain as to what disposition to make of his hat; it was a new, high silk hat, too elegant an acquisition to the mind of one reared in the more than frugal atmosphere of Lincoln's home to be intrusted to the pine boards of the flag-draped stand in front of him. Douglas, divining the mental process of which Lincoln himself, in the embarrassment of the moment, was scarcely conscious, stepped forward and relieved him of the hat, holding it for him till the conclusion of the address.

During the early days of the conflict between the North and the South, which he had patriotically done his utmost to avert, he aided Lincoln with able counsel, pointing out to him among other things the necessity of securing Fortress Monroe and cautioning him against bringing the troops through Baltimore, prophesying that bloodshed that did occur. But before the conflict had assumed those proportions which it did later in the same year, on the 3d of June, 1861, Douglas's life closed. His last hours were spent in Chicago among the people he had so ably represented. There, with his wife beside him, and her mother and brother, James Madison Cutts, who was his private secretary, near by, and with his keen, dark eyes upon her face, as if he would forever fix upon his spirit its beautiful lineaments, and his hand in hers, his mind retaining all its strength and clearness till the end, he uttered his last memorable words. She had asked him if he had any message to send to his sons, and he replied, "Tell them to obey the laws of the land and to support the Constitution of the United States."

Generous even to the point of recklessness, he died poor. Subscriptions were immediately begun among his friends towards a fund for his widow. She declined, however, to receive it, and begged that the sum thus raised be devoted to the erection of a monument to Douglas's memory.

She returned to Washington and lived quietly for some years in the first home of her married life, taking no part in the social world whose magnet she had been for so many seasons. But she was not forgotten; and when she again, after four years of seclusion, resumed her place in its midst, her reappearance brought up innumerable memories of her earlier days, of her conquest of the "Little Giant," and of her queenly part in his political campaigns.

She was the guest of honor at a dinner given in the early winter of 1865, just as the war drew to its close, by Miss Harris, whose name lives in history in a very different connection: she was sitting beside Lincoln in his box at the theatre on the night he was shot. Among the guests bidden to meet Mrs. Douglas was Captain, afterwards General, Robert Williams, one of the handsomest and most gallant officers of the army, and a member of a well-established family of Culpeper County, Virginia. Mrs. Douglas was already known to him by fame, and suspecting her to be possessed of all the caprices of a spoiled beauty, he had no desire whatever to meet her, though he accepted Miss Harris's invitation for the sake of the pleasure he would otherwise derive from her hospitality. After he had been presented to Mrs. Douglas, however, whatever enjoyment he had anticipated from meeting others there passed from his mind. Combined with a gentle dignity, there was about her all the sweet simplicity of a young girl, and nothing that ever so remotely suggested any consciousness of a fame that was as wide as her country. He followed her with all the earnestness with which he had meant to avoid her, and in January, 1866, she again became a bride.

The chronicle of the most magnificent ball ever given, not only in Washington, but probably in the country, and which occurred shortly after her marriage to General Williams, hands her name and that of Kate Chase Sprague down to fame as the two most beautiful women who participated in the brilliant event. It was given by the French minister, Count de Moutholon, by order of his Emperor, in honor of the officers of the French fleet then anchored at Annapolis.

She gradually, however, abdicated her social queenship for a crown she wore with no less grace, that of a most noble motherhood.

Wedded to an army man, her life led her from post to post, and the greater part of her days from that time was spent in the West.

The little life of the only child of her first marriage covered but a few months. The six children of her second marriage, however, are all living and grown to manhood and womanhood, two of her sons being in the military service of their country.

The last few years of her life were passed in Washington, where her husband held the office of Adjutant-General until his retirement from the service. There her eldest daughter was married, in January, 1899, to Lieutenant John Bryson Patton, and there also, on the 26th of the same month, her own life terminated. Time had touched her lightly, as if he would not rob her of a loveliness that had been as much a charm to women as to men. Asked once the secret of her youthful appearance, she blushed like a girl and confessed that she was happy, and that therein must lie the solution.

It is difficult to analyze the qualities of that power of fascination which some women have exercised over the world. They are as varied as the individuality of the women to whom they have been intrusted. In Adèle Cutts, however, they seem to have emanated from a singular beauty of soul, a species of primal innocence that proclaimed itself at once to the sense of every beholder and preserved her alike from any touch of vanity or worldliness.

To those who knew her she seemed little changed as the years rolled on, because to her classic beauty of form was added an indestructible quality which was a beauty of the spirit.

EMILIE SCHAUMBURG
(MRS. HUGHES-HALLETT)

Every Philadelphia girl who has hoped to be a belle during this last quarter of the century, and even many who have been without social aspirations, have been brought up on traditions of Emilie Schaumburg.

Yet so eminent was the place she held in the old city whose standard of belleship had been fixed far back in the colonial days of America, that no one has ever succeeded her.

Accustomed through long generations to women of wit, beauty, and a certain unapproachable taste in matters of personal adornment, Philadelphia has developed a critical instinct which is not easily satisfied.

"The ladies of Philadelphia," wrote Miss Rebecca Franks over a century ago, "have more cleverness in the turn of an eye than those of New York have in their whole composition. With what ease have I seen a Chew, a Penn, an Oswald, or an Allen, and a thousand others, entertain a large circle of both sexes; the conversation, without the aid of cards, never flagging nor seeming in the least strained or stupid. Here, in New York, you enter the room with a formal set courtesy, and, after the how-dos, things are finished; all is dead calm till the cards are introduced, when you see pleasure dancing in the eyes of all the matrons, and they seem to gain new life."

It is but just to state that this fair critic of New York's social status belonged to Philadelphia, where, though her wit was rather of a satirical turn, she was noted as a lady possessed of "every human and divine advantage." She was the youngest of the three daughters of David Franks, one of whom became the wife of Oliver de Lancey, another of Andrew Hamilton, of "Woodlands," one of the famous suburban estates of the city, while Rebecca, "high in toryism and eccentricity," after an unusually brilliant belleship, bestowed her hand on Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Johnston, and went to live in England.

Of the Chews referred to in her letter from New York, so sparkling was the conversation which Harriet could maintain, that Washington, when he was sitting for his portrait to Stuart, liked to have her in the room that his face might wear its most agreeable expression, such as her wit always induced. She married the son of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the young Charles Carroll who was at one time suspected of having a tender interest in Nellie Custis, Washington's step-granddaughter. Her sister Margaret, who was one of the beauties who made the great feast of the Mischianza so famous, also married a son of Maryland, Colonel John Eager Howard, a patriot and a hero. Passing through her room one evening he heard her relating to her children the pathetic story of Major André, who had been her knight in the tournament of the Mischianza.

"Don't believe a word of it, children," he interrupted, as their young hearts swelled with pity at her graphic and romantic recital; "he was an infernal spy."

Ann Willing, who married William Bingham in her seventeenth year, was another woman who helped to establish the standard of female beauty and excellence in Philadelphia. "She is coming quite into fashion here," John Adams's daughter wrote of her from London, "and is very much admired. The hair-dresser who dresses us on court days inquired of mamma whether she knew the lady so much talked of here from America, Mrs. Bingham. He had heard of her from a lady who had seen her at Lord Duncan's."

London society, and especially that of the court circle, was not very favorably disposed towards Americans in the year 1786, and the subsequent graciousness of their reception they doubtless owed largely to the impression created by the beauty and character of such a woman as Mrs. Bingham, who was one of the first to seek a presentation at the court of George III. after our separation from the mother-country. Her striking beauty of face and form, her easy deportment, that had all the pride and grace of high breeding, the intelligence of her countenance, and the entire affability of her attitude disarmed every feeling of unfriendliness and converted every one, said Mrs. Adams, into admiration.

The unfortunate Margaret Shippen, as gifted as she was beautiful, deprived by her husband's treason before she was twenty years old of the shelter of her home and the protection of her family, the Executive Council of Pennsylvania bidding her to leave the State and not return till the close of the war, and Sarah, the daughter of Benjamin Franklin and wife of Richard Bache, and the embodiment of Republican principles, which caused her to insist that there was "no rank in America but rank mutton," are two noted examples of that diversity which gave flavor to the social life of a city that has tempted the pens of both native and foreign critics.

Philadelphia was one of the first of the Northern cities to admit women to the pit of its theatres, and visitors from quiet Boston and commercial New York at one time condemned its social tone as fast, because its young men gave wine-suppers, and because it danced to the music of a full colored orchestra, known as Johnson's Band, while other cities were performing their more or less graceful gyrations to the tunes furnished by one or two musicians.

The Quaker town had made a brilliant social record before many of the cities of America had so much as laid one stone upon another. By comparison it is old. It has its elements of newness, like all bodies that grow and progress, but they are not readily assimilated by that little coterie that long ago laid the foundation of its establishment in the southeastern section of the city. It is from the predominance of this conservative social principle in Philadelphia that people unfamiliar with its life have derived the erroneous impression that its general progress and development have been correspondingly deliberate.

To hold such a position as Emilie Schaumburg held in Philadelphia implies the possession of such personal qualities and such gifts as would be an open door to the most exclusive society of the world.

She was well born, coming of ancestry distinguished both in their native land and in that of their adoption. Her grandfather, Colonel Bartholomew Schaumburg, belonged to one of the oldest families in Germany. He was a godson and ward of the Landgrave Frederick William, with whom he was closely connected. When still quite a youth, the Landgrave made him an aide-de-camp to Count Donop, who commanded the Hessian subsidies furnished by Germany to England to aid her in the war with the American colonies.

Schaumburg was sent with despatches to Donop, who, however, had been killed before the arrival of his young aide-de-camp. Learning for the first time of the righteousness of the American cause, he gallantly offered his services to the commander-in-chief of the American forces. He fought valiantly all through the war, and at its close accepted a commission in the standing army organized by the new government. At the Cotton Centennial held at New Orleans in 1884, his commissions signed by Washington were exhibited and were objects of much interest. He took part in many of the early Indian wars, and was appointed quartermaster-general in the war of 1812.