After the war, while her younger children were still growing up, and during her husband's lifetime, she lived for some years in New York, on a picturesque old property on the Hudson that still bore its Indian name, Pocaho. Now, however, she lives again in the State that once gave her health, wealth, and honors, near the great sea, away from which she feels that she is never fully alive.
Her life has been full of changes and events, to all of which her alert intelligence and quick sympathies have made her keenly susceptible, and which wrung from her recently a plaintive, "We are tired, my heart and I." That was all, for one who knew every phase of her life has already borne testimony to that "sweet and happy and forbearing temper which has remained proof against the wearing of time."
[SALLIE WARD]
(MRS. GEORGE F. DOWNS)
One of those extraordinary women which the world from time to time produces, who rise to eminence solely through the force of their own personality, was born in America as the nineteenth century was rounding out its first quarter. Known all her life throughout the entire country, she was one of the most conspicuous figures in the life of the South and Southwest, and was the object of a sentiment that fell but little short of worship among the people of the state of Kentucky, to which she belonged.
James Lane Allen who has studied his people from every stand-point, draws the typical Kentucky woman for us as "a refinement of the English blonde, with greater delicacy of form, feature, and color."
"A beautiful Kentucky woman," he says, "is apt to be exceedingly beautiful. Her voice is almost uniformly low and soft, her hands and feet delicately formed, her skin quite pure and beautiful in tint and shading, her eyes blue or brown, her hair nut-brown or golden; to all which is added a certain unapproachable refinement."
Of such a class, Sallie Ward, with her blue eyes full of twinkling humor and rather far apart, lending to her round face an expression of candor, which was further borne out by her somewhat large though finely shaped mouth disclosing handsome teeth in her happy tendency to frequent smiling, her brown hair, and a skin faultless in tint and texture, has been the most noted representative. A radiant woman, instinct with sparkling life from the crown of her beautiful head to the tips of her slender feet, spoiled, wilful, lovely, and loving, it is probable that but few people will ever truly estimate her character.
She was the daughter of Robert J. Ward, a man of considerable wealth and of that distinction of manner and bearing which is commonly designated as of the old school. Like many another gifted young Kentuckian, similarly placed in life, he began his career with political aspirations, and before he had reached his thirtieth year he had been elected Speaker of the State Assembly. His own private concerns, however, gradually absorbing his time and interest, drew him away from his youthful ambitions. He married the heiress of a large fortune, Miss Flournoy, of Georgetown, Kentucky, the descendant of an old Huguenot family, to whose fame her immediate ancestors had further contributed by the gallant part they had taken in the war of the American Revolution.