At his own table Mr. Benton was an oracle to whom everyone listened eagerly. I have seen twenty guests held spellbound as he recited, with thrilling realism, a history of the Clay-Randolph duel, with the details of which he was so familiarly acquainted. I never heard him allude to his great fight in the Senate, when, the galleries crowded with men inimical to him, his wife and General Jones sent out for arms to protect the fearless Senator from the onslaught which seemed impending; nor to his nearly thirty years’ strife for the removal of the onerous Salt Tax; but the dinners before which his guests sat down were flavoured with the finest of Attic salt, of which he was a connoisseur, which served to sting into increased eagerness our interest in his rich store of recollections. Wherever Mr. Benton was seen he was a marked personage. There was something of distinction in the very manner in which he wore his cravat, and when he spoke, men listened instinctively. Of his daughters, Mrs. Frémont was probably the most gifted, and Mme. Boileau the most devoted to fashionable society. Mme. Boileau was the wife of a French attaché, and was remarked as she drove about in the streets with a be-ribboned spaniel upon the front seat of her calash. Many years after my acquaintance in Washington with Mr. Benton’s family (it was during the Cleveland Administration), I was present at a reception given by Mrs. Endicott when I observed among the guests a very busy little woman, in simple black apparel, whose face was familiar to me, but whom I found myself unable to place; yet everyone seemed to know her. I heard her address several foreigners, in each case employing the language of his country, and, my curiosity increasing, I asked at last, “Who is that small lady in black?” To my surprise, she proved to be Mrs. Frémont! I soon made my way to her. She seemed almost impatient as I said, “Mrs. Frémont, I can never forget you, nor the charming evenings at your father’s house, though you, I am sure, have forgotten me!” She looked at me searchingly and then spoke, impetuously: “Yes! yes! I remember your face perfectly, but your name—Tell me who you are, quick. Don’t keep me waiting!” I promptly gratified her, and in the conversation that followed, I added some reference to her father’s great book, “Thirty Years’ View,” which, until the destruction of my home during the Civil War, had formed two of our most valued volumes. “Ah!” cried Mrs. Frémont. “You are a woman of penetration! I have always said my father’s book is the Political Bible of America. I know it will not perish!”