Mrs. Polk still lives at “Polk Place,” Nashville, Tennessee, a stately and noble home, like the Hermitage in this respect, that the mortal remains of its master, amid verdure and flowers, beneath the shadow of its trees, await the final call. The inscription on the monument, to the memory of President Polk, is in Mrs. Polk’s own words; and here, in this home, consecrated by his death, the venerable widow of the eleventh President of the United States peacefully awaits the summons which will recall her to the Soul whose life and name it has been her chief earthly glory to embellish and to represent. * * * * * Mrs. Taylor, the wife of General Taylor, the twelfth President of the United States, was one of those unknown heroines of whom fame keeps no record. Her life, in its self-abnegation and wifely devotion, under every stress of privation and danger on the Indian’s trail, amid fever-breeding swamps, and on the edge of the battle-field, was more heroic than that ever dreamed of by Martha Washington—or continuously lived by any Presidential lady of the Revolution—yet time will never give her a chronicler. When General Taylor received the official announcement that he was elected President of the United States, among other things he said: “For more than a quarter of a century my house has been the tent, and my home the battle-field.” This utterance was simply true, and through all these years, this precarious house and home were shared by his devoted wife. He was one of the hardest worked of fighting officers. Intervals of official repose at West Point and Washington never came to this young “Indian fighter.” His life was literally spent in the savage wilderness, but whether in the swamps of Florida, on the plains of Mexico, or on the desolate border of the frontier, the young wife persistently followed, loved and served him. Thus all her children were born, and kept with her till old enough to live without her care; then, for their own sakes, she gave them up, and sent them back to “the settlements,” for the education indispensable to their future lives—but, whatever the cost, she stayed with her husband.