From the moment Mrs. Lincoln began to receive recriminating letters, she considered herself an injured individual, the honored object of envy, jealousy and spite, and a martyr to her high position. No doubt some of them were unjust, and many more unkind; but it never dawned upon her consciousness that any part of the provocation was on her side, and after a few tastes of their bitter draughts she ceased to open them. Even death did not spare her. Willie Lincoln, the loveliest child of the White House, was smitten and died, to the unutterable grief of his father and the wild anguish of his mother. She mourned according to her nature. Her loss did not draw her nearer in sympathy to the nation of mothers that moment weeping because their sons were not. It did not lead her in time to minister to such, whom death had robbed and life had left without alleviation. She shut herself in with her grief, and demanded of God why he had afflicted _her_! Nobody suffered as she suffered. The Nation’s House wore a pall, at last, not for its tens of thousands of brave sons slain, but for the President’s child. The Guests’ Room, in which he died, Mrs. Lincoln never entered again; nor the Green Room, wherein, decked with flowers, his fair young body awaited burial. In the same way, Mrs. Lincoln bewept her husband. And there is no doubt but that, in that black hour, she suffered great injustice. She loved her husband with the intensity of a nature, deep and strong, within a narrow channel. The shock of his untimely and awful taking-off, might have excused a woman of loftier nature than hers for any accompanying paralysis. It was not strange that Mrs. Lincoln was not able to leave the White House for five weeks after her husband’s death. It would have been stranger, had she been able to have left it sooner. It was her misfortune, that she had so armed public sympathy against her, by years of indifference to the sorrows of others, that when her own hour of supreme anguish came, there were few to comfort her, and many to assail. She had made many unpopular innovations upon the old, serene and stately _régime_ of the President’s house. Never a reign of concord, in her best day, in her hour of affliction it degenerated into absolute anarchy. I believe the long-time steward had been dethroned, that Mrs. Lincoln might manage according to her own will. At-any-rate, while she was shut in with her woe, the White House was left without a responsible protector. The rabble ranged through it at will. Silver and dining-ware were carried off, and have never been recovered. It was plundered, not only of ornaments, but of heavy articles of furniture. Costly sofas and chairs were cut and injured. Exquisite lace curtains were torn into rags, and carried off in pieces.