The home of Mr. and Mrs. Ogle Tayloe was a museum of things rare and beautiful, vying in this respect with the Corcoran Mansion and the homes of the several members of the Riggs family. One of its treasured mementos was a cane that had been used by Napoleon Bonaparte. Mrs. Tayloe belonged to a New York family; the Tayloes to Virginia. She was a woman of fine taste and broad views, a very gracious hostess, who shrank from the coarse or vulgar wherever she detected it. When Washington became metamorphosed by the strangers who poured into its precincts following the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln in 1861, the Tayloe Mansion was shrouded, its pictures were covered, and its chandeliers wound with protective wrappings. Entertaining there ceased for years. “Nor have I,” said Mrs. Tayloe to me in 1866, “crossed the threshold of the White House since Harriet Lane went out.” At the Tayloe home I often exchanged a smile and a greeting with Lilly Price, my hostess’s niece, who, when she reached womanhood, was distinguished first as Mrs. Hamersley, and afterward as Lillian, Duchess of Marlborough. At that time she was a fairy-like little slip of a schoolgirl, who, in the intervals between Fridays and Mondays, was permitted to have a peep at the gay gatherings in her aunt’s home. Many years afterward, being a passenger on an outgoing steamer, I learned that Mrs. Hamersley, too, was on board; but before I could make my presence known to her, as had been my intention, she had discovered me and came seeking her “old friend, Mrs. Clay,” and I found that there lingered in the manner of the brilliant society leader, Mrs. Hamersley, much of the same bright charm that had distinguished the little Lilly Price as she smiled down at me from her coign of vantage at the top of the stairway of the Tayloe residence. But the prince of entertainers, whether citizen or official, who was also a prince among men, the father of unnumbered benefactions and patron of the arts, was dear Mr. Corcoran. When my thoughts turn back to him they invariably resolve themselves into “And, lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest” Throughout our long acquaintance Mr. Corcoran proved himself to be what he wrote himself down, “one of the dearest friends of my dear husband.” He was already a widower when, shortly after our arrival in Washington, I met him; and, though many a well-known beauty would have been willing to assume his distinguished name, my own conviction is that Mr. Corcoran never thought of marriage with any woman after he committed to the grave the body of his well-beloved wife, Louise Morris, daughter of the brave Commodore.