After the War—The Home of President Johnson—Shut Up in the Mountains—Two Years of Exile—A Contrast—Suffering for their Country—Secretly Burying the Dead—A Wife of Seventeen Years—Midnight Studies—Broken Down—A Party of Grandchildren—“My Dears, I am an Invalid”—“God’s Best Gift to Man”—The Woman Who Taught the President—A “Lady of Benign Countenance”—Doing the Honors at the White House—“We are Plain People”—The East Room Filled with Vermin—Traces of the Soldiers—A State of Dirt and Ruin—Mrs. Patterson’s Calico Dress—In the Dairy—A Nineteenth Century Wonder—How the Old Carpets were Patched—The Greenbacks are Forthcoming—How $30,000 were Spent—Buying the Furniture—Working in Hot Weather—“Wrestling with Rags and Ruins”—“Renovated from Top to Bottom”—What the Ladies Wore, and What They Didn’t—The Memory of Elegant Attire—Impressing the Public Mind—How Unperverted Minds are Affected—“Bare-necked Dowagers”—“A Large Crowd of Bare Busts”—Elderly Ladies with Raven Locks—The Opinion of a Woman of Fashion—Very Good Dinners—Obsequious to the Will of “the People”—Doors Open to the Mob—Sketching a Banquet—Sentimental Reflections on the Dining Room—The Portraits of the Presidents—The Impeachment Trial—Peace in the Family—The Grant Dynasty—Looking Home-like—Mrs. Grant at Home—What Might Be Done, if—What Won’t Work a Reformation—A Pity for Miss Nellie Grant—How She Suddenly “Came Out”—“A Full Fledged Woman of Fashion”—A “Shoal of Pretty Girls”—How a Certain Young Lady was Spoilt—Brushing Away “the Dew of Innocence”—Need of a Centripetal Soul—Society in the Season—Rare Women with no Tastes—The Wives of the Presidents Summed Up. Mrs. Lincoln was succeeded in the White House by three women, who entered its portals through the fiery baptism of suffering for their country’s sake. While President Johnson was performing his duties as Senator in Washington, his family were shut up in the mountains of East Tennessee, where the ravages of war were most dreadful. For more than two years he was unable to set eyes on either wife or child. While many of the mushroom aristocracy, who afterwards looked upon them so superciliously, were coining their ill-gotten dollars out of the blood of their country, these brave, loyal women were being “hunted from point to point, driven to seek refuge in the wilderness, forced to subsist on coarse and insufficient food, and more than once called to bury with secret and stolen sepulture those, whom they loved, murdered because they would not join in deeds of odious treason to union and liberty.”