Opposite the drawing room, to the left of the hall, is the long, high dining room, studded with windows and flooded with western light. Turning back the clock of time for almost a century, one sees gathered around this generous board a distinguished company, including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams; Hamilton, Marshall, Jay and Pinckney; Webster, Calhoun, Clay and Randolph; Decatur, Porter, Lafayette, Steuben, Sir Edward Thornton and other notabilities. [Illustration: DRAWING ROOM] Although it is not recorded that any of the Tayloes shone very conspicuously in their country’s annals by reason of any great service rendered in positions of public trust, yet because of their great wealth and social prominence, their lives touched at various points many of the great names which emblazon the pages of history. At the time he took possession of his Octagon home, in 1801, Colonel Tayloe’s income was seventy-five thousand dollars a year—three times as much as the President’s salary at that period—and the unbounded hospitality dispensed from his two households at Mt. Airy and the Octagon, embodied the most splendid features of the regal Old South. He was married at the early age of twenty-one, to Miss Ann Ogle, daughter of Governor Benjamin Ogle, of Maryland. Descended from the Corbins, Gwynnes, Platers and Fauntleroys, connected by the marriage of his sisters with the Lees, Pages, Washingtons, Carters, Beverleys and Lomaxes of Virginia, and by his own marriage with the Bladens, Taskers, and Ogles, of Maryland, Colonel Tayloe’s social prestige was limitless. One does not live long in Washington ere he learns to uncover and speak softly before a lineage which reaches to the “Eastern shore,” either of Virginia or of Maryland; and when a line is discovered which connects both these aristocratic strongholds—well, words are but poor things, and a solemn hush is the most approving corollary. [Illustration: ECLIPSE]