 This old house, which has grown and changed with the years, began in 1890 with a German farmer, William Meyer, and his family. The first part was built of the native limestone, which abounds in these hills. In 1912, the house and several hundred acres of land were purchased by my husband's aunt and uncle, and their family lived here for nearly 40 years. The house sits in the little valley of the Perdonalis, the land sloping down gently to the river, which is normally a very placid stream. And it rises slightly to the north through pastures of alfalfa and Sudan grass, of which the view is beautiful. The room is in fact the heart of the house, in time and in reality. Here the family gathers before dinner, and guests come, and the life of the house radiates out from here. The big fireplace is the central feature of the room. I've heard Lyndon say that when he used to come here to family reunions or Thanksgiving dinner, that all the children would be asked to stand up on the raised hear and say their little speech, or recite their poem, or sing their song. This room holds many things that tell the story of our lives and travels. I think probably my most favorite possession is that letter on the wall. It's the facsimile of one from General Sam Houston to Lyndon's great-grandfather, George Washington Baines, who was a Baptist minister, and in the manner of most Baptist ministers, quite poor. He had borrowed two hundred dollars from a member of his congregation, Sam Houston. This letter recites in a flamboyant and amusing manner about the loan. Sam Houston says he is going to knock off the interest because you have the fortune to minister to a congregation, which does not pay its pledges to the church, but on the other hand may very soon think that you should pay them for attending church. The paintings that you see are by a Texas artist, Porphyria Salinas, who captures the spirit of the hill country very well, I think. The red of the Schumach and the Spanish oak in the autumn, and the yucca in bloom in the spring. The medallion of the inauguration of January of 61, I gave to my husband for his birthday. There is the other medallion for the inauguration of January 65, with Lyndon his president and Hubert Humphrey as vice president. The only picture of a person in the room is of Speaker Sam Rayburn, who played a strong and dear role in our lives. He was my husband's mentor, and just as truly our children's friend. When we first came here and began working on the place, I asked the foreman's children and Linda and Lucy if they would bring me any arrowheads that they could find. I told them that I would give them a dollar for each one that was good enough to use. I noticed that Linda Bird kept on bringing me more than anybody. I found that she had spread her offers more widely than I had mine, and that she was paying people 50 cents for an arrowhead, and then collecting a dollar for me. The copper around the room is a collection that I have picked up in my travels. Some of it from the flea market in Paris or from the bazaar in Istanbul, and some very treasured pieces made by boys back in the NYA in 1936, when Lyndon was Texas director of the National Youth Administration. The lovely old Mexican chest was given to us by President Dior Sordas, and above it hangs an earlier gift from another Mexican president, López Mateus, who came to see us in 1959 when Lyndon was majority leader of the Senate. The old-fashioned game in many rural homes is dominoes, and we have an off-to-use domino table in this room. On many evenings after dinner, my husband and his fellow ranchers congregate around the table for a game that is composed of equal parts of skill and Cold War dialogue. I can see them hunched over the table in their war of wit and nerves, hurling the shafts at their opponents. They hope to demoralize them and laughing when they succeed. The dining room is probably the most elastic room in the house by choice and by necessity. It was a rather spacious dining room in Aunt Frank's time. I remember coming here for dinner once in the mid-thirties. Lyndon brought me to see his Aunt Frank and Uncle Clarence, and I never dreamed that I would be returning here to live in this house. So we kept it very much as it was for a good many years, and then the varied and abolient life of my family and the increasing number of guests caused us, in about the spring of 62, to push the walls farther north and put in a large picture window. I think anyone who lives in the country wants to be able to look out on the land. This dining room table really began its life as a round table with a lot of leaves, but when we moved it in that first summer, we put all the leaves in it for a large supper the first night, and so it has remained ever since. We always seemed to have enough to fill it up. If you think it is bizarre to have an executive chair as the host chair, so it is. That chair came down with a lot of furniture from Washington. Somehow it got deposited in the dining room. My husband liked it, and so it has remained there. The large candlesticks at either end of the buffet are banisters from a temporary capital of the state of Texas. The shorter candlesticks are a gift from Governor and Mrs. John Connolly, who have been a part of our lives ever since Lyndon's first race for Congress. There are a few formal dinners here, but occasionally we do have one for a festive occasion of our visiting Chief of State. Then we use three round tables seating some 30 or so guests at a quite lovely dinner with candlelight and wine, such as we had for Chancellor Erhard of Germany, a Prime Minister Eshkahl of Israel. But usually it is quite informal, with family and friends and children and neighbors and staff and whoever the business of the day has brought. The kitchen is the vital part of this household, which helps make it a happy place. We try to serve the fruit of the land, so to speak. In midsummer, corn fresh off the cob and tomatoes right off the vine from our own garden nearby, and thick country bacon, pomade bread, and peach preserves add to every meal. This little valley is good peach country. Familiar in the kitchen and in the dining room as well is the latest addition to our family, our grandson Len, an untidy eater who sits in a high chair close to the President. There's a telephone hooked up under the table and he gives his grandfather considerable competition for it. In a way, he completes the cycle of my warm memories of this room. I came here first as a bride, and now here we are with our grandchild. This is the den, which lies between the big living room and the bedroom wing of the house. It is a sort of grand central station of a place on the way to the kitchen and to the guest bedrooms upstairs. Sometimes after dinner, the ladies come in here for coffee and talk while the men stay in the big living room to continue their business discussions. My favorite piece is this coffee table, which is made from a slab of an oak tree that grew in Sherwood Forest for 1400 years. That piece of needlework, which means a lot to me, was made by the daughter of not one Texas governor, but two. When I describe it like that, my friends from far away are amazed. Rita Ferguson Nall, whose parents were Governor Jim Ferguson and Governor Miriam Ferguson, better known as Paul and Maul Ferguson, gave it to us after a particularly difficult Senate campaign of 1941. Governor Jim Ferguson had long been a political friend of Lyndon's family, but in this election he had opposed us, and it perhaps made the difference in us losing by a razor-thin margin. Several months after the election, Rita Nall came to see us and said, we decided we were wrong. We just want to let you know that you're still our friends. I'm very proud of the Winslow Homer painting on that wall of a Civil War scene. It's called Soldiers in Night Camp, a melancholy vignette of that time of rending in our nation's life. And a very amusing little thing given to me by Pearl Mester for my birthday. It's a picture of O'Henry, who lived for a time in our neighboring city of Austin, and below it in his own handwriting. The more wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes. The deer head on the wall was the very first thing I hung when we moved into the house. As you can see, it is the place where our tall visitors hang their hats. And so this house, this countryside, which I have been showing you, is a setting for a family, for a man. It's a place to work and a place to rest from working. But I see it through my eyes. I've been telling them that it's fun to be home for a few days. I've been saying this through my eyes for more years than I want to count. But for more than 50 years, I've come to this house to hang my Christmas stocking, to get to my apples, which were quite a treat to youngsters in this area at my age at that time. I have walked through this room so many, many times through the years, guarding older women from falling from this step down here, sitting in front of this fire, waiting for the dinner bell, taking calls that you had to hold your breath until you were sure that they didn't involve a real emergency or a good many times, they have involved emergency. But always when you came here, you came to refresh yourself, to retool for the challenges ahead. And I guess all of us at times in our life look back and want the food that our mother cooked for us, want the scenes that we enjoyed on our birthdays at Christmastime or after school was out. Here I came to show my first high school graduation suit and my first long pants. Here I remember I put a tin can on my first dog's tail and the dog tore out and as the can hit the ground he was frightened and he ran and my uncle gave me a lecture and I remember I went behind the kitchen and cried my heart out because I had let my uncle down. When I come here and stay two or three days, it's a breath of fresh air, it's new strength. I go away ready to challenge the world. Sometimes when I come here I think that I just need to come. That's the way I felt this week. That's why I left Thursday afternoon because there's no other place, no Virgin Islands, no Miami coastlines, no boat trips across the Atlantic that can do for me what this soil and what this land and what this water and what this people and what these hills and these surroundings can do. They represent the memories of half a century and they provide the stimulation and the inspiration that nothing else or no one else can provide. So generations have passed through this house. They've come and gone and I expect as long as there is life for me, this is going to be my fountain of strength. This is going to be the place where I come to try to, as Ponce de Leon said, regain my youth.