were there, claiming that Emily had publicly snubbed her a short while previously. This naturally riled the General and he raised considerable of a rumpus. In his flurry of anger he threatened to take the Donelsons home and leave them there, and this threat got under the Donelsons’ skin. Accordingly, when they all got back to Tennessee in June, the Donelsons did not go to the Hermitage to stay but went to the home of Mrs. Donelson’s mother, then a widow. The Eatons made a rather showy and carefully pre-arranged visit to Tennessee during this summer, a feature of the trip being their entertainment at the Hermitage; and Major Donelson later explained that he and his wife went to Mrs. Donelson’s to stay because they did not want to put themselves in the way of the honors General Jackson intended to pay to the Eatons at the Hermitage. But the President’s feelings were hurt. “When I expected you and Emily to go to my house and remain with me as part of my family, it was declined,” he wrote in a letter to Major Donelson that fall when the two of them were back in Washington carrying on that childish interchange of formal letters within the walls of the White House which almost precipitated a crisis at that time. Jackson smelt trouble brewing as early as July, when he mentioned in a letter to Major Lewis from the Hermitage: “It may so happen that I shall return to the city in company with my son alone,” and asked the Major to be looking about for some eligible man to serve as his secretary. “My connections have acted very strangely here,” he wrote; adding, with characteristic fire: “but I know I can live as well without them as they can without me, and I will govern my own household or I will have none.” When the time came to return to Washington in October, Mrs. Donelson announced that she would spend the winter in Tennessee with her widowed mother; and it is not recorded that General Jackson interposed any violent objection to this program. Major Donelson, however, went along with him.