What he did believe us to be, piloted as we were by two such brigand-like gentlemen as Senator Clay and Mr. Dowdell, we never knew; enough that our tired party were soon installed in comfortable apartments. It was by reason of this significant episode that I first realized the potency in Washington of conventional apparel and Congressional titles. My husband being duly sworn in on the 14th of December, 1853, in a few days our “mess” was established at the home of Mr. Charles Gardner, at Thirteenth and G Streets. Here my first season in Washington was spent. Besides Senator Clay and myself, our party was composed of Senator and Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and Representatives Dowdell and Orr, and to this little nucleus of congenial spirits were afterward added in our later residences at historic old Brown’s Hotel and the Ebbitt House, many whose names are known to the nation. Though a sad winter for me, for in it I bore and buried my only child, yet my recollections of that season, as its echoes reached our quiet parlours, are those of boundless entertainment and bewildering ceremony. The season was made notable in the fashionable world by the great _fête champêtre_ given by the British Minister, Mr. Crampton, and the pompous obsequies of Baron Bodisco, for many years resident Minister from Russia; but of these I learned only through my ever kind friend, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who for months was my one medium of communication with the fashionable outside world. She was a beautiful woman, with superb carriage and rare and rich colouring, and possessed, besides, a voice of great sweetness, with which, during that winter of seclusion, she often made our simple evenings a delight. While shortly she became a leader in matters social, Mrs. Fitzpatrick was still more exalted in our own little circle for her singing of such charming songs as “Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch,” and other quaint Scotch ditties. Nor was Mrs. Fitzpatrick the one musician of our “mess,” for Mr. Dowdell had a goodly voice and sang with lusty enjoyment the simpler ballads of the day, to say nothing of many melodious Methodist hymns. My experiences as an active member of Washington society, therefore, began in the autumn of 1854 and the succeeding spring, when, notwithstanding an air of gravity and reserve that was perceptible at that social pivot, the White House, the gaiety of the capital was gaining an impetus in what later appeared to me to be a veritable “merry madness.”