Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 June 1882 — Mrs. Douglas’s Tea-cups. [ARTICLE]

Mrs. Douglas’s Tea-cups.

A story has been going the rounds of the press lately attributed to Mrs. Senator Bingham—if any historian can remember such a senator—that infringes too closely on the life of Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas to be let ass unmolested. The tradition-tellers and legend-lovers of Washington have remembered the pretty and graceful ways of Mrs. Douglas, and never ceased to hold her up a model of a statesman’s wife. Her tact and her amiability were boundless, and although when she married the Little Giant she was very young and much his junior, she adapted herself to the position from the start so thoroughly thatno wife of twenty years experience in public life could equal her. For every friend, for every constituent, and for every eDemy of Senator Douglas she had just the right thing ready to say, and with her wonderful memory for faces, names and places, she was never without some personal inquiries to make of each stranger. Her social instinct was as marvelous as the gift of second sight, and when she accompanied Mr. Douglas on his famous journey through the South to visit his mother, there was not a person encountered in all that tour that she could not have recognized at sight and called by name, had they entered her parlor unannounced a year later. Mrs. Douglas’s popularity was wonderful at that time, and her face and winning ways made friends right and left for the Senator, at that time a candidate for the presidency. At one of her receptions in Washington a great, shy, awkward constituent from the most rustic region of Illinois, presented himseir in Mrs. Douglas's door way, sent up there from the Capitol by the Senator, who Had assured him that his wife would Le delighted to see him. The visitor was anything but a parlor ornament, a rude unpolished son ,of the praire, unused to any of the ways of society, but a power in tbe politices of his home, and a man whoss Influence could be of vast assistance to Mr. Douglas. Entering the room gave him a nervous chill, Mrs. Douglas’s pretty greeting threw him into a feaver, and her inviting him out to the refrehsment-room com pleted a case of palsy. Ignoring his trepidation, she chatted awav to him herself, paid no attention to Bis stammering refusals, and poured out the tea into some miraculous little cups of egg-shell Bevres. Grasping the fairy calyx iivhis fingers for a first sip, the delicate bit of Sevres was crushed to pieces and the hot tea poured in a stream over Mrs. Douglas’s silken train. With a gay laugh, the lady said: “How brittle they are, just look at mine,” and with a mighty effort she broke another cup between her fingers. Reassured, the constituent drew his breath and found him self at ease, while that incomparaale hostess talked to him; asked about his mother, his wife and his children all of whom she remembered so well and called by name. That man went home to woak for, vote for and swear by St/ephen A. Douglas, and way back of his political convictions lay the pieces of those two broken teacups.