region, on the corner of N
and Fourteenth Street, lived Lieutenant Commander (now Rear Admiral) and
Mrs. Francis J. Higginson, and the latter's attractive sister, Miss Mary
Haldane.

Not far from our dwelling on Corcoran Street lived the attractive wife
of _Monsieur_ Grimaud de Caux, _Chancelier_ of the French legation, who
left unfading memories behind her. During our many delightful chats I
was much interested in the accounts of her early life and experiences in
Ireland, and I especially recall many things she told me concerning the
members of the Wilde family, with whom she had been quite intimately
associated. I learned from her that Oscar Wilde inherited his aesthetic
tastes largely from his mother. She was a woman of unusual type and
habitually dressed in white--at a time, too, before white garments had
become so generally prevalent. I was also told that Oscar Wilde's father
was an oculist of some prominence, and that he built a mansion so
singular in its construction that the wits of Dublin called it "Wilde's
eye-sore."

Another of my intimate friends of those days was Mrs. Mary Donelson
Wilcox, widow of the Hon. John A. Wilcox, formerly Secretary of the U.S.
Senate, a Member of Congress and a veteran of the Mexican War. She was a
woman of rare intellectual ability, and subsequent to her husband's
death was for a time one of the official translators of the government.
She was the daughter of Colonel Andrew Jackson Donelson, a nephew of
President Jackson as well as his adopted son and private secretary.
General Jackson when President was a widower, and it was while Mrs.
Donelson was presiding as mistress of the White House that Mrs. Wilcox
was born. Her memory remained clear until her last illness, and her
recollections of prominent men and events, extending back to her
childhood, and especially those of her early life at the White House,
were of exceptional interest. I was especially amused by her account of
the prompt manner in which General Jackson sent her mother back to
Tennessee because she refused to accord social recognition to the wife
of General John H. Eaton, his Secretary of War. As is well known, this
was "Peggy O'Neal" who, before her marriage to Eaton, was the widow of
Purser John B. Timberlake of our Navy, who committed suicide while
serving in the Mediterranean. The relation which she sustained to the
disruption of Jackson's cabinet has passed into history and is too well
known to bear repetiti