She was her husband’s private secretary, and, probably, was the only lady of the White House who ever filled that office. She took charge of his papers, he trusting entirely to her memory and method for their safe keeping. If he wanted a document, long before labeled and “pigeonholed,” he said: “Sarah knows where it is;” and it was “Sarah’s” ever ready hand that laid it before his eyes. At the age of twenty she came to Washington as the wife of Mr. Polk, then a Member of Congress from Tennessee. Many years of her youth and prime were spent at the Capital, and, as she had no children, she had more than ordinary opportunity to devote herself exclusively to the service of her husband. She was the wife of the Speaker of the House before she was the wife of the President of the United States, and in every position seems to have commanded superlative respect and admiration on her own behalf, aside from the honor always paid to the person holding high station. Many poems in the public prints were addressed to her—one, while she was the wife of a Member of Congress, by Judge Story. When her husband became the President, Mrs. Polk was deemed the supreme ornament of the White House, and the public journals of the land broke forth into gratulation that the domestic life of the Nation’s house was to be represented by one who honored American womanhood. Mrs. Polk was tall, slender, and stately, with much dignity of bearing, and a manner said to resemble that of Mrs. Madison. The stateliness of her presence was conspicuous, and so impressed an English lady, that she declared that “not one of the three queens whom she had seen, could compare with the truly feminine, yet distinguished presence of Mrs. Polk.” Mrs. Polk was considered a very handsome woman. Her hair and eyes were very black, and she had the complexion of a Spanish donna. Without being technically “literary,” she was fond of study, and of intellectual pursuits, and possessed a decided talent for conversation. In her youth, she became a member of the Presbyterian church, and through a long life her character has been eminently a Christian one. Always devout, her piety in later years is said to have merged into austerity; but even in the prime of her beauty and power, she never gave her smile or presence to the dissipation, the insidiously corrupting influence of what is termed “gay life in Washington,” whose baleful exponent to-day is the all-night “German” so destructive to freshness of beauty and purity of soul.