The devotion to duty, and the cheerfulness under privation of this tender woman—the wife of their chief,—penetrated the whole of his pioneer army. It made every man more contented and uncomplaining, when he thought of her. Her entire married life had been spent thus; but when her husband, as Colonel Taylor, took command against the treacherous Seminoles, in the Florida war, when the newspapers heralded the new-made discovery, that the wife of Colonel Taylor had established herself at Tampa Bay, it was considered unpardonably reckless, that she should thus risk her life, when the odds of success seemed all against her husband. Nothing could move her from her post. As ever, she superintended the cooking of his food; she ministered to the sick and wounded; she upheld the _morale_ of the little army by the steadfastness of her own self-possession and hope, through all the long and terrible struggle. Time passed, and the brave Colonel of the Border became the conquering hero from Mexico, bearing triumphantly back to peace the victories of Palo Alto, Monterey, and Buena Vista, inscribed upon his banners. The obscure “Indian fighter” was at once the hero and idol of the Nation. The long day of battle and glory was ended at last, the wife thought,—and now she, the General, their children, in a four-roomed home, were to be kept together at last, in peace unbroken. It is not difficult to imagine what a home so hardly earned, so nobly won, was to such a woman. Nor is it hard to realize that when that home was almost immediately invaded by a nomination of its chief to the Presidency of the Nation, the woman’s heart at last rebelled. The wife thought no new honor could add to the lustre of her husband’s renown. She declared that the life-long habits of her husband would make him miserable under the restraints of metropolitan life, and the duties of a civil position. From the first, she deplored the nomination of General Taylor to the Presidency as a misfortune, and sorrowfully said: “It is a plot to deprive me of his society, and to shorten his life by unnecessary care and responsibility.” When, at last, she came to the White House, as its mistress, she eschewed the great reception-rooms and received her visitors in private apartments. She tried, as far as possible, to establish her daily life on the routine of the small cottage at Baton Rouge, and she essayed personally to minister to her husband’s comforts, as of old, till her simple habits were ridiculed and made a cause of reproach by the “opposition.”