Ould's prominence was rather augmented after the outbreak of the war and his removal to Richmond, where he was made commissioner of the Confederate government for the exchange of prisoners. He had married a celebrated Virginia beauty, Miss Sarah Turpin, and had four children, all of whom, with one noted exception, are still living. His wife, after having been long an invalid, died before his family was grown, and he, some years later, married Mrs. Handy, of Baltimore, the mother of the beautiful May Handy, one of Richmond's belles of the present day. Mattie Ould was born in the District of Columbia, which she left in her childhood for the home with which her fame is associated. She returned, however, to spend the last two years of her school life in the Visitation Convent, Georgetown. Though known to all Richmond from her childhood, her renown throughout the South dates from her first appearance at the White Sulphur Springs, which in her day, before the advent of the Northern pleasure-seeker, still possessed all the distinctive features of a Southern watering-place. Though it was already a long-established resort, to the magic which her presence shed about it during the seasons that she spent there it owes much of its wide fame to-day. All the details of the war were then yet vivid memories, and there many a battle was fought over again in graphic words by men whose bravery and gallantry in action have never been surpassed. Many of them had been distinguished officers in the army of the Confederacy,--Joe Johnston, of Virginia; Wade Hampton, of South Carolina; Gordon, of Georgia; Beauregard, of Louisiana; Butler, Gary, the gallant Pickett, of Gettysburg fame; and Hood, of Alabama, then lifting himself about on his crutches. It was such men as these who stamped their striking individuality upon the life of the Southern watering-places at that period, and among whom, keenly appreciating the wit, ardently loving the beauty, and reverencing the goodness of a woman beyond all things, Mattie Ould came to be the greatest belle the South has had since the war. [Illustration: Lizzie Cabell (Mrs. Albert Ritchie)] While she was ever superlatively attractive to men, she was yet a generous friend to women, and frequently avenged the slights to which she saw some plain woman subjected, for, besides the scintillating qualities that made her a popular idol she had many noble traits that commended her to a more profound and lasting admiration.