In this setting Rachel was at her best. She was now fifty-eight years old. Stout, kindly, motherly, and frankly growing old; but always the gracious hostess and always deeply interested in the gay doings of the young people who were drawn into the charmed circle of her hospitable household. Her garden had taken deeper root. Her house was more elegantly furnished and her acquaintance with the outside world had been greatly extended; but aside from the fact that she took her religion a little more solemnly and that she had been saddened by the malicious attacks made upon her, her nature had changed but little with the passing years. She never lost her love of people, her keen interest in things about her, nor her gentle sympathy. The famous Frenchman and his entourage had hardly left when the Hermitage became the gathering place for a great corps of notables, who entered heart and soul into the campaign which placed its master in the President’s chair and which completely vindicated its mistress. Never in the history of the nation has such a bitter, unscrupulous attack been waged against a candidate for public office; and never, under any circumstances, has an American woman received such shameful treatment at the hands of a political party. It is a page in history which is best overlooked. However the storms raged on the outside, they did not change the happy atmosphere of the Hermitage. If the mistress suffered—as of course she did—she kept up a brave front for the General and the other members of her household. Henry A. Wise, later governor of Virginia, who was a guest at the Hermitage of this period, gives in his _Seven Decades of the Union_, an interesting picture of the house itself, as well as the social life which centered about it. This description is especially important, for it supplies the only known description of the interior of the brick house which was erected in 1819. Wise had just been married to Anne Jennings, daughter of the Rev. Obadiah Jennings, Jackson’s Presbyterian minister in Nashville, and the bride and groom, with their bridal party, had been invited to spend the honeymoon at the Hermitage. “We arrived at the Hermitage to dinner,” Wise wrote, “and were shown to a bridal chamber magnificently furnished with articles which were the rich and costly presents of the city of New Orleans to its noble defender.