Surrounded with comforts and luxuries, and enjoying the companionship of her relatives and friends, Mrs. Polk glides calmly down the vale of years, with the memory of a past all brightness, and the hopes of a future all peace. The lifetime imitation of a pure and useful standard of excellence has rewarded her with a glorious fame, and she dwells among the friends of her youth, honored and respected, trusted and beloved. XVI. MARGARET TAYLOR. The importance attached to Presidential honors is not in our country the inheritance of persons born to the wearing of them. Monarchial governments, by tradition and law, designate not only who is the “chief magistrate,” but also provide candidates in advance for the succession. People, therefore, born to such high estate are always, from infancy onward, objects of world-wide interest; and the minutest acts of their lives, before they achieve their inherited position as well as after, are subjects of note from a thousand pens. In our own country the popular will selects its candidates for the highest office within its gift as often from those who have suddenly received popularity as from those who have, by antecedent history, become known to fame. It is probably true that, just before the breaking out of actual hostilities between this country and Mexico, there was no military officer—his long and faithful public service considered—who was as little known to the country at large as General Taylor. That the future Mistress of the White House who was buried in the seclusion of his retired private life, should be little known out of her domestic circle, is therefore not surprising; and that a family, the members of which had always courted seclusion and were satisfied with making perfect the narrow circle of their accepted duties, should shrink from publicity and notice, is not to be wondered at; and, as a consequence, there is but little left to afford material for the pen of the historian. Mrs. Taylor and her daughter “Betty,” who for a while shone forth as the acknowledged “first ladies of the land,” never sympathized with the display and bustle of the White House, and they always performed such official duties as were imperatively forced upon them, by their exalted position, as a task that had no compensation for the sacrifices attending it. The key to Mrs. Taylor’s life was touched by General Taylor himself, who, when receiving from an appointed speaker, at Baton Rouge, the official announcement that he was elected President of the United States, among other things said: