In a pecuniary point of view, Mrs. Polk’s life has passed in ease and affluence. Her father was comparatively wealthy, and Mr. Polk’s circumstances were always good. In addition to his property in Tennessee, he owned a large and flourishing plantation in Mississippi. Chief-Justice Catron, Major Daniel Graham and other distinguished personal friends, have attended to Mrs. Polk’s financial affairs during her widowhood, and have thus relieved her from all care. Mrs. Polk, though ever willing to converse, and always enriching the conversation from her ready store of information and observation, is remarkably reticent in regard to her own life. Her most familiar friends fail to persuade an account of incidents relating purely to herself. She is never seen in public except at church. The visits of chosen friends are grateful to her, but she does not return them, and no attraction is sufficient to draw her far away from the home where cluster so many dear and sacred memories. Occasionally she spends a few days with her relatives in other counties. Having no children, Mrs. Polk, some time after the death of her husband, adopted a niece, who has ever since been an inmate of her house. No employment could have served better to console the many lonely hours that must be the inevitable heritage of a widowed heart, than the charge of a daughter. Mrs. Polk was born in the dawn of the nineteenth century, and is a pure type of a class which is rapidly becoming extinct. With her will pass away many of the excellences and not a few of the foibles of a class modelled after the aristocracy of the old world on their graftings in the new. Her life has been spent in an age and country where chivalric honor to woman is a matter of national pride, yet in a land of slaves and slavery. The young and middle-aged of to-day will never know the opportunities of time and means which she, half a century ago, enjoyed; for the South is changed, and verily old things have passed away and all are new. The present generation, thrown more upon their own resources, and passing through the perplexities of change and misfortune, will grow away from the old regime, and may perhaps lose many of their virtues with too few of their faults. During the late civil war, she suffered in common with the people of the South, losing much of her valuable property, but was fortunately left with sufficient means to enable her to live in her usual style of comfort. Her sympathies were with the section of country in which she was reared, but her conduct was throughout befitting her station, and no expression or action of hers is a reflection of aught save refined bearing and high-toned sensibility.