_Three o’clock._—Will you believe it, my sister? we have had a battle, or a skirmish, near Bladensburg, and I am still here within sound of the cannon! Mr. Madison comes not; may God protect him! Two messengers, covered with dust, came to bid me fly; but I wait for him.... At this late hour a wagon has been procured; I have filled it with the plate and most valuable portable articles belonging to the house; whether it will reach its destination, the Bank of Maryland, or fall into the hands of British soldiery, events must determine. Our kind friend, Mr. Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured; and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out; it is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York for safe-keeping. And now, dear sister, I must leave this house or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it, by filling up the road I am directed to take. When I shall again write to you, or where I shall be to-morrow, I cannot tell! On their return, the President and Mrs. Madison occupied a private house on Pennsylvania avenue till the White House was repaired. After it was rebuilt and the treaty of peace signed, the _levées_ given in the East Room, in the winter of 1816, are said to have been the most resplendent ever witnessed in Washington. At these, congregated the Justices of the Supreme Court in their gowns, the Diplomatic Corps in glittering regalia, the Peace Commissioners and the officers of the late war in full dress, and the queen of the occasion in gorgeous robes and turban and bird of paradise plumes. At one of these Presidential banquets Mrs. Madison offered Mr. Clay a pinch of snuff from her beautiful box, taking one herself. She then put her hand in her pocket, took out a bandanna handkerchief, applied it to her nose and said: “Mr. Clay, this is for rough work,” and this, touching the few remaining grains of snuff with a fine lace handkerchief, “is my polisher.” This anecdote is an emphatic comment on the change of customs, even in the most polished society. If Mrs. Grant, to-day, were to perpetrate such an act at one of her _levées_, the fact that it stands recorded against the graceful, gracious and glorious Dolly Madison would not save her from the taunt of being “underbred” and suggestive of the land of “snuff dippers.”