Early in this administration, the east room at the White House, which had figured in the Democratic campaign speeches as an audience chamber sumptuous enough for royalty, was discovered to be too shabby for a President of Jackson’s simple habits. So four large mirrors, heavily framed in gilt, were hung against its walls, their bases resting on mantels of black Italian marble. Chandeliers gleaming with glass prisms were suspended from the ceiling; damask-covered chairs, their woodwork gilded like the mirror frames, were substituted for the worn-out furniture which had sufficed for the Adams family; the windows were richly curtained; a Brussels carpet, with the sprawling pattern then so much admired, was stretched over the entire floor; and this array of elegance was capped with bouquets of artificial flowers, in painted china vases, distributed among the mantels and tables and in the window recesses. These things did not long retain their freshness. Jackson’s dinners had features quaint enough, but his receptions were little short of riots. A literary visitor has left us the description of one where “generals, commodores, foreign ministers and members of Congress” brushed elbows with laborers who had come in their working clothes from a day of canal digging, and “sooty artificers” direct from the forge. “There were majors in broadcloth and corduroys, redolent of gin and tobacco, and majors’ ladies in chintz or russet, with huge Paris earrings, and tawny necks profusely decorated with beads of colored glass. There were tailors from the board and judges from the bench; lawyers who opened their mouths at one bar, and tapsters who closed theirs at another; and one individual--either a miller or a baker--who, wherever he passed, left marks of contact on the garments of the company.” Meanwhile, the waiters who attempted to cross from the pantry to the east room with cakes and punch were intercepted by a ravenous horde who emptied the trays as fast as they could be refilled, so that little or nothing reached the better-mannered guests. This went on till the Irish butler, in exasperation, enlisted a dozen stalwart men and armed them with billets of wood, to surround the waiters as a guard, and keep their sticks swinging about the food so briskly that it could not be captured except at the cost of a broken head. Of course the carpet, curtains, and cushions were deluged with sticky refuse, and broken bits of china and glass were ground into powder under foot.