General Taylor was by habit a public servant, and his future, as shaped by circumstances, he quietly accepted. But Mrs. Taylor opposed his being a candidate for the Presidency. She spoke of it as a thing to be lamented, and declared when such a position was first foreshadowed, that the General’s acquired habits would not permit him to live under the constraints of metropolitan life; and to those of her intimate friends who spoke of his being President, she sadly replied, “That it was a plot to deprive her of his society, and shorten his life by unnecessary care and responsibility.” With the announcement that General Taylor was President-elect, came his resignation as an officer of the army. It was after all a sad day for him and his family, when he severed a connection that had lasted so long, and had been made so memorable by a life of conscientious duty. Miss Betty now appeared on the scene as an agent of national interest. The White House under Mrs. Polk had been grave and formal. There was a cold respectability and correctness about it, that was somewhat oppressive to the citizens of Washington; and there was a degree of earnest pleasure created in the public mind when it was understood that as a consequent of General Taylor’s election, there would preside over the White House a lady eminently attractive in her personal appearance, young in years, accomplished in mind, and made more interesting, if possible, by being the bride of Major Bliss, who had served so faithfully under her father as his accomplished Adjutant-General. Elizabeth Taylor, third and youngest daughter of President Taylor, was twenty-two years of age, when, as Mrs. Bliss, she assumed the formal duties of Hostess of the White House, her mother, from disinclination, refusing to accept the responsibility of official receptions. Mrs. Bliss, or Miss Betty, as she was popularly called, was at this time admired by all who saw her, and had the distinction of being the youngest daughter of any chief magistrate who had honored our Presidential receptions with her presence. Her face was pleasant, her smiles exceedingly attractive, and her eyes beamed with intelligence. She had been throughout her life but little with her parents. When not among her relations in Virginia or Kentucky, she was at some boarding-school. Her education was completed at Philadelphia, after which she resided with her parents. No inauguration of any of the later Presidents was more enthusiastically celebrated than General Taylor’s. He was at the time the nation’s idol. Everything in his history charmed the popular mind, and the fact that he was a total stranger to Washington—that his family were unknown, gave a mystery and novelty to the whole proceeding quite different from common place precedence.