“My mother’s health was entirely too delicate to permit her to charge herself with the semi-official social requirements of the mansion, and my married sisters being unavoidably absent for the most of the time, the task devolved upon Mrs. Robert Tyler to represent my mother on stated occasions. She continued in the rôle of honors, as they are termed, until after my mother’s death, and my brother made his arrangements to practise law in Philadelphia, by which time it also happened that Mr. Semple’s affairs became differently accommodated, and he proceeded to sea as a Purser in the United States Navy, when my sister Letitia[22] became at liberty to take up her abode in Washington. Accordingly, both the President and myself now addressed to her letters, inviting her to assume the position and duties of hostess of the White House, which she consented to do, and so acted until May, 1844. Footnote 22: Letitia, the second and only surviving daughter and fourth child of Mrs. Letitia Tyler, married in early life the nephew and adopted son of Judge Semple, of Williamsburg, Virginia, who reared and educated him to manhood, his own father, a brother of the Judge, as well as his mother, dying in his infancy, leaving him by will a handsome fortune. The Semples are of the family of the Earls Dundonald, of Scotland, and of the same branch with that of the celebrated Blair, appointed by King James the first commissioner of Virginia, and who was afterward President of William and Mary College. “During my mother’s life, and up to this date, always contemning pretension and worldly vanity, we lived in the ‘White House’ as we lived at home, save that we were obliged to have rather more company, less select as to true worth than was altogether agreeable. In the course of the ‘fashionable season,’ and while the sessions of the Congress lasted, we gave two dinner parties each week, very much after the plain, substantial Virginia manner and style, to the first of which, usually confined to gentlemen from different parts of the country visiting Washington, and who had shown respectful attention to the President and family, twenty guests were always invited; and to the second, usually embracing both ladies and gentlemen from among the dignitaries of the different departments of the Federal and State governments, and the diplomatic corps of foreign governments, forty persons were invited, making in either case quite a full table.