ttage on I Street, on the site of the present Russian
embassy, where so many years later the wife and daughter of Benjamin F.
Tracy, Harrison's Secretary of the Navy, lost their lives in a fire that
destroyed the house. Among the attractions of this home was a remarkable
collection of Hamilton relics which subsequent to Mrs. Holly's death was
sold at public auction. The sale, however, did not attract any
particular attention, as the craze for antiques had not yet developed
and the souvenir fiend was then unknown.

It was while I was living on Twelfth Street that I first met Miss
Margaret Edes, so well known in after years to Washingtonians. She was
visiting her relatives, the Donoho family, which lived in my immediate
vicinity. Her host's father was connected with _The National
Intelligencer_, and the son, Thomas Seaton Donoho, was named after
William Winston Seaton, one of its editors. Thomas Seaton Donoho was a
truly interesting character. He was decidedly romantic in his ideas and
many incidents of his life were curiously associated with the ivy vine.
He planted a sprig of it in front of his three-story house, which was
built very much upon the plan of every other dwelling in the
neighborhood, and called his abode "Ivy Hall"; while his property in the
vicinity of Washington he named "Ivy City," a locality so well known
to-day by the same name to the sporting fraternity. His book of poems,
published in Washington in 1860, is entitled "Ivy-wall"; and, to cap the
climax, when a girl was born into the Donoho family she was baptized in
mid-ocean as "Atlantic May Ivy." In addition to his poems, he published,
in 1850, a drama in three acts, entitled, "Goldsmith of Padua," and two
years later "Oliver Cromwell," a tragedy in five acts.

Soon after my marriage, Mr. Gouverneur acted as one of the pallbearers
at the funeral of his early friend, Gales Seaton, the son of William
Winston Seaton, and a most accomplished man of affairs. In those days
honorary pallbearers were unknown and the coffin was borne to the grave
by those with whom the deceased had been most intimately associated. The
Seatons owned a family vault, and the body was carried down into it by
Mr. Seaton's old friends. After the funeral I heard Mr. Gouverneur speak
of observing a coffin which held the remains of Mrs. Francis Schroeder,
who was Miss Caroline Seaton, and whose husband, the father of Rear
Admiral Seaton Schroeder, U.S.N., was at one time U.S. Minister