Whatever were his hopes or his disappointment, his wife shared them. His accepting the nomination from so radical a party had meant the breaking up of many friendships for her, which in itself was a genuine grief to a woman of her temperament. The anguish she endured during the first months of the war between the North and the South, which she spent in St. Louis among familiar faces, whom the circumstances of her position as the wife of a Northern general had estranged from her, left its record in her beautiful hair, which, from a warm brown, became quite white within a few weeks. No matter with what heroism we endure, we sometimes bear all the rest of our lives the scars which our courage has cost us. She has never outgrown, however, her early attachment to the South, to which she is united by many ties of blood. During the famine there that followed the war she applied to Congress for relief, which was immediately granted, with a ship to carry all the supplies the Freedman's Bureau could furnish. With warm and tender sympathies she has always taken up any cause that appealed to her with an enthusiasm that communicated itself to others. Relating to Mrs. Dix one evening the case of one of Lieutenant Frémont's men, who had been disabled by being wounded in both legs, and to whom Congress had refused a pension on the ground that he had not been regularly enlisted at the time the wound was inflicted, she did not observe that a man who was calling upon Senator Dix was attentively listening to all the graphic details of her story. It was Preston King, of New York, and at that time chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. He took Senator Dix to the door with him when he left, and bade him tell her to write out the story as she had just told it and send it to him, and he would see that the man got his pension; and he did. With what tender gratitude and reverence the man himself, Alexis Ayot, a Canadian by birth, came to thank her! "I cannot kneel to thank you," he said, balancing himself upon his crutches, "Je n'ai plus de jambes; but you are my Sainte Madonne, et je vous fais ma prière." During her early California days she extended her generous young hand to a youthful compositor who was working on the _Golden Era_. He dined with her every Sunday, and she gave him not only that recognition and encouragement that were in themselves a stimulus to his talent and ambition, but she used her influence to obtain for him salaried offices that lifted him above anxiety concerning his material condition, and gave him the leisure necessary to the best development of his genius. His name is Bret Harte, and so entirely did he recognize his indebtedness to her that he once wrote to her: "If I were to be cast away on a desert island, I should expect a savage to come forward with a three-cornered note from you to tell me that at your request I had been appointed governor of the island at a salary of two thousand four hundred dollars."