Neither the Secretary of War nor his wife appeared frequently in society in the earlier days of his appointment, the attention of Mr. Davis being concentrated upon the duties of his office, and a young family engaging that of his wife. I have heard it said that so wonderful was Mr. Davis’s oversight of the Department of War while under his charge, that it would have been impossible for the Government to have been cheated out of the value of a brass button! So proud was his adopted State of him, that at the close of Mr. Pierce’s administration, Mississippi promptly returned Mr. Davis to Washington as Senator. Almost immediately thereafter he became the victim of a serious illness, which lasted many weeks, and a complication of troubles set in which culminated in the loss of sight in one eye. During that period my husband gave up many nights to the nursing of the invalid, who was tortured by neuralgic pains and nervous tension. Senator Clay’s solicitude for Mr. Davis was ever of the deepest, as his efforts to sustain and defend him to the last were of the most unselfish. Aaron V. Brown, who became Postmaster-General in 1857, was at once one of the kindest-hearted and simplest of men, loving his home and being especially indifferent to all things that savoured of the merely fashionable and superficial. He occupied a house which by long association with distinguished people had become prominently known. Not infrequently the Brown residence was alluded to as the “Cabinet Mansion.” Here, among other celebrities, had lived Attorney-General Wirt, and in it Mrs. Wirt had compiled the first “Flora’s Dictionary.” The hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, being boundless, served to accentuate its reputation, for, unlike her husband, Mrs. Brown was socially most industrious, and, being exceedingly well-to-do, was full of enterprise in the invention of novel surprises for her guests. Mrs. Brown, who was the sister of the afterward distinguished Major-General Pillow, of the Confederate Army, was the first hostess in Washington, I think, to introduce orchestral music at dinner, and her daughter, Narcissa Sanders, with as pronounced a spirit of innovation,[5] sent out enormous cards of invitation in her own name, inviting the distinguished folk of the capital to the house of the Postmaster-General to meet—herself! I remember a dinner at this luxurious home of Mr. Brown, at which my host, who took me in, amused me immensely at the expense of the elaborate feast before us, and at some of his wife’s kindly, if costly, foibles. Behind a barrier of plants a band played softly; around us were the obsequious waiters from Gautier’s.