Mrs. Waddie was wifely, motherly, and a little over-energetic, as became the spouse of so mild and unpractical a gentleman. It was she who devised and carried out that purchase of real estate by which their comfortable property became a handsome fortune. It was she who officered the campaign which ended in giving him the civic crown of Member of Congress, and when the bad cookery of the American snob’s paradise had impaired his health and compelled his resignation, it was again his energetic wife who suggested to General Taylor that she wished the embassy to Florence. It was obtained, of course, and was one of the most creditable acts of that President’s brief career. His successor did not venture to recall Mr. Waddie, although he knew the scorn with which that gentleman, usually so amiable, regarded those ridiculously unsuccessful makeshifts and cowardly compromises of 1850. Mr. Waddie’s fortune, high social position, formidable wife, his serene worth and merited popularity, made him a person whom an accidental President could not presume to offend; and if he were already an enemy, at least it were wiser to keep him in a foreign land. So his wife and the ambassador remained at Florence, where her balls crushed the Grand Duke’s. She instituted a subscription for fronting the Duomo and introduced into Florentine life Buckwheat Cakes, Veracity, and Sewing Machines--of which only the first-named are still popular in that beautiful city. It was the last year of the embassy when they thought proper to send for Miss Clara, who, with Diana, Mr. Waddie’s ward, had been in charge of Miss Sullivan at home. This was the first year of Mr. Pierce’s administration, and while he was hesitating whom to appoint in Mr. Waddie’s place. He did appoint, in time, a tobacconist from the South-west, who viewed the world only as a spittoon.