RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
home, but in the beginning I confined my efforts largely to minor matters connected with the house service itself. I wished to install certain members of the house personnel of my own choosing, and this I did. Later I made some changes in a few important social usages.
There are certain duties connected with the White House routime which have been performed by the same employés throughout one Administration after another and each new President's wife finds these men invaluable and wonders, I am sure, how the White House could ever be run without them. For instance, there are Mr. Warren S. Young, who has been for thirty years the Social Executive Officer, and Colonel W. H. Cook, who became Chief Custodian under Lincoln in 1865 and is holding the same office to-day. The duties os each of these men are delicate in the extreme, but they knkow their work down to the minutest detail and it would be difficult to measure the value to the woman who, in public opinion, is wholly responsible for the White house.
As to my own innovations, I decided in the first place to have, at all hours, footmen in livery at the White house door to receive visitors and give instructions to sightseers. Before my time there had been only "gentlemen ushers" who were in no way distinguishable from any other citizen and many a time I have seen strangers wander up to the door looking in vain for someone to whom it seemed right and proper to address a questino or to hand a visiting card. The gentlemen ushers I retained, the head usher, Mr. Hoover, having become invaluable through similar service under every Administration since Cleveland' first, but I put six coloured men in blue livery at the door, two at a time, relieving each other at intervals, and I think many a timid visitor has had reason to be thankful for the change. incidentally they lend a certain air or formal dignity to the entrance which, in my opinion, it has always lacked.
These footmen received everybody who sought to enter
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