Nervous and impatient, Mrs. Madison waited in her inhospitable quarters for the President’s coming; and as night came on, her mind was relieved by seeing him approaching, accompanied by the friends with whom she left him the night before. He was careworn and hungry, and after devouring the remnants of her scanty meal, sought the repose he so needed. “That uneasy and humiliating repose, not the last of Mr. Madison’s degradations, was, however, the turning point of his fortunes; for while he slept, Ross hastily and clandestinely evacuated Washington, victor and vanquished alike victims of, and fugitives from, imagined perils.” But the terrified citizens knew not that the British were impotent, and dismayed at the non-appearance of their fleet. Every crash of thunder was to them a source of alarm, and its rumblings in the distant clouds the imagined noise of approaching troops. Toward midnight, a courier, breathless from fatigue and excitement, warned the President that the enemy were coming, and he was compelled to pass the rest of that miserable night in a hovel in the distant woods, with the boughs sobbing and sighing their requiem around him, and the last efforts of the storm expending itself in moans, while the wind swept through the tall trees. The atmosphere was cooled by the great and prolonged storm, but all nature seemed to weep from exhaustion, and the stillness of the closing hours of the night were in marked contrast to the roar and din of the preceding twenty-four hours.