woman he had ever known. She corresponded for many years with
Thackeray, the Duke of Wellington and many other prominent Englishmen,
and in her own country was equally distinguished. In the course of one
of our numerous conversations she told me that after the death of Edward
Everett she loaned his biographer the letters she had received from that
distinguished orator. During the latter part of her life she gave up her
house in Richmond and came to Washington to reside, where she remained
until the end of her life. She left no descendants. Her husband's
mother, Jane Stith Craig, daughter of Adam Craig of Richmond, was
immortalized by Edgar Allan Poe, who, fictitiously naming her "Helen,"
paid feeling tribute to her charms in those beautiful verses commencing:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

Among my other schoolmates at Madame Chegaray's were Susan Maria
Clarkson de Peyster, a daughter of James Ferguson de Peyster, who
subsequently married Robert Edward Livingston; Margaret Masters, a
daughter of Judge Josiah Masters of Troy, New York, and the wife of John
W. King; Virginia Beverly Wood, a daughter of Silas Wood of New York,
who became the wife of John Leverett Rogers; and Elizabeth MacNiel,
daughter of General John MacNiel of the Army and wife of General Henry
W. Benham of the U.S. Engineer Corps.

After a number of years spent in teaching, Madame Chegaray gave up her
New York school and moved to Madison, New Jersey (at one time called
Bottle Hill), with the intention of spending the remainder of her life
in retirement; but she was doomed to disappointment. Discovering almost
immediately that through a relative her affairs had become deeply
involved, she with undaunted courage at once opened a school in Madison
in the house which she had purchased with the view of spending there the
declining years of her life. Previous to this time I had been one of her
day scholars; I entered the second school as a boarding pupil. Once a
week we were driven three miles to Morristown to attend church. I recall
an amusing incident connected with this weekly visit to that place. One
Sunday a fellow boarder, thinking that perhaps she might find some
leisure before the service to perfect herself in her lesson for the
following day, thoughtlessly took along with her a volume of French
pla