repeatedly enjoyed the hospitalities of the White House, been admitted with kind cordiality to drawing-rooms and dinings, now vied with the wife of the landlord in denouncing vehemently the inclination of the men present to admit the Presidential party. Embittered by their real and imaginary wrongs, they lost all sense of honor and refinement, and stood in their true colors before the lady who never for one moment forgot the dignity becoming her station. She preferred exposure to the storm to contention; but the escort with her, indignant at the contemptible conduct of the rude persons within, obliged the ungracious occupants to open the doors. The old tavern stood in the midst of an apple orchard laden with ripening fruit, and hardly had the travellers left their carriages when the hurricane dashed the apples, in several instances the entire trees, with fearful strength against the house. Mrs. Madison spread the lunch she had prepared the day before at the White House, and in silence, interrupted only by her inquiries for the welfare of her attendants, they ate their damp food and smothered the intense disgust they felt for families who only the day before they deemed firm friends. The hours dragged slowly on, and the anxious wife looked in vain for her absent husband. Did she, in that hour of grief and humiliation, think of her illustrious predecessors who had endured like her the black ingratitude of the women of her country? Had she forgotten that the ladies of Philadelphia, in 1776, refused Mrs. Washington similar attention, and treated with scorn the wife of the Commander-in-chief, who was using every human endeavor to organize and establish a continental army? Or did it recur to her that a time would come when, like Mrs. Washington, she would again, through the brightening prospects of peace, receive the flattering adulation of those very persons, and the respect and admiration of the more cultivated throughout the land? Did she think of that strong, resolute “Portia” of the Revolution who, in her modest home near the sea, denied and scorned the report that her husband had deserted to the British, yet who patiently submitted to the averted looks, and silent reproaches of those whom she thought her friends, and waited for the storm to blow over, and truth once more to triumph? Philadelphia was a great distance then from the coast of Massachusetts, and mails were brought only at rare intervals, but with her strong faith she trusted in her husband’s honor and felt that it was not betrayed. Time corrected the false rumor, but her heart had been deeply wounded, and it never forgot, if it forgave, the conduct of many who, in her hour of trial, turned against her.