While all this was going on below, Mrs. Lincoln, shut up in her apartments, refused to see any one but servants, while day after day, immense boxes, containing her personal effects, were leaving the White House for her newly-chosen abode in the West. The size and number of these boxes, with the fact of the pillaged aspect of the White House, led to the accusation, which so roused public feeling against her, that she was robbing the Nation’s House, and carrying the national property with her into retirement. This accusation, which clings to her to this day, was probably unjust. Her personal effects, in all likelihood, amounted to as much as that of nearly all other Presidents’ wives together, and the vandals who roamed at large through the length and breadth of the White House, were quite sufficient to account for all its missing treasures. The public also did Mrs. Lincoln injustice, in considering her an ignorant, illiterate woman. She was well-born, gently reared, and her education above the average standard given to girls in her youth. She is a fair mistress of the French language, and in English can write a more graceful letter than one educated woman in fifty. She has quick perceptions, and an almost unrivalled power of mimicry. The only amusement of her desolate days, while shut in from the world in Chicago, when she refused to see her dearest friends and took comfort in the thought that she had been chosen as the object of pre-eminent affliction, was to repeat in tone, gesture and expression, the words, actions and looks of men and women who, in the splendor of her life in Washington, had happened to offend her. Her lack was not a lack of keen faculties, or of fair culture, but a constitutional inability to rise to the action of high motive in a time when every true soul in the nation seemed to be impelled to unselfish deeds for its rescue. She was incapable of lofty, impersonal impulse. She was self-centred, and never in any experience rose above herself. According to circumstance, her own ambitions, her own pleasures, her own sufferings, made the sensation which absorbed and consumed every other. As a President’s wife she could not rise above the level of her nature, and it was her misfortune that she never even approached the bound of her opportunity. CHAPTER XXV. THE WHITE HOUSE NOW.