Of this rare woman, our “lady of the manor” was the only child. “Upon her she lavished extraordinary maternal devotion, hardly ever suffering her to be out of her sight. Her daughter had hardly reached girlhood when her beautiful mother assumed the simplest matronly attire. Ever afterwards she seemed rather displeased than flattered when allusions were made to her own still remarkable appearance.” Cora Livingston was worthy to be the child of such a mother. She was the most famous _belle_ of the Jackson administration. She married Thomas Barton, who went as Secretary of Legation with her father, the Minister to France, and who remained as _Chargé d’Affaires_ when Edward Livingston returned. In the course of time, mother and daughter, both widows, spent their winters in New York and their summers at Montgomery Place, that grand old manor on the Hudson, of which we catch glimpses through its immemorial trees, as we sail by on the river. Here, beautiful and saintly, that mother died, October, 1860, at the age of seventy-eight. Warned by physicians to seek a softer climate, after the lapse of generations, in the winter of 1871 the daughter returned to Washington, the scene of her childish home and early triumphs. She did not belong to things gone by. With her two stately and beautiful nieces she became at once the centre of a rare group of friends, of the attention and reverence of the first men in the State, and an object of admiring comment wherever she appeared. She appeared at many morning receptions. I see her now as I saw her the first time stepping from her carriage into the great portico of the White House, across its corridor to the Blue Room, with the light, springing step of a girl; and yet, the soft clinging black dress, the quaint hood of black silk, with its inside snowy _ruche_, all told that she made not the slightest pretence to youth. And now, in these summer days, comes the word: “While packing some books in a trunk to go to Montgomery Place, she bent down, burst a blood vessel in the head, and without warning died.” They have all been morning receptions to which I have asked you,—the “morning” ending at 5 P. M. I cannot invite you to go to the “German,” which begins at 11 P. M. and ends at daybreak. I have too deep a care for your physical and spiritual health to ask you to do any such thing. When you read of the gay doings and bright assemblies here, perhaps you think it hard sometimes that you must stay away in a quiet place to work or study. You feel almost defrauded because you are shut out from the splendor and mirth and flattery of fashion. You long for the pomp and glory of the world, and sigh that so little of either falls on your life-path. Thus I shall seem cruel to you when I say that you had better be shut up for the next five years, even in a convent, silently growing toward a noble life in the world afterward, than to be caught and carried on by its follies now, before you have learned how to live.