REMINISCENCES.

HEN, more than sixty-two years ago, about a year after my ordination as pastor of a little flock in Philadelphia, I one Sunday saw John Quincy Adams, then on his way home to Quincy, Massachusetts, after his inauguration as President of these United States, enter the little building which we called our church (but which was popularly regarded as a conventicle, that some people, out of horror at our heresies, avoided not only entering but even passing, or even looking at, if they had to pass it), would any one believe me were I to pretend that having the President among my hearers stirred in me no feeling inconsistent with the hour and the place?

Always afterwards Mr. Adams attended the Unitarian Church when he was in Philadelphia on a Sunday, with one exception, when he went to the First Presbyterian Church, of which the Rev. Albert Barnes was pastor. On that occasion, when asked after church what was the subject of discourse, his answer was, so I was told, "The usual one,-the Atonement." What a change has come over the general tone of the pulpit since then! Nowadays there is oftentimes hardly any difference to see between orthodox and liberal preachers. (I use these terms only by way of designation.) The denunciatory tone that used to thunder from Evangelical pulpits has quite disappeared.

To return to Mr. Adams. I became his ardent partisan. I was bound to be so, not only by my father's great respect for him, but because I held him to be an honorary member of my little congregation. I forgave him for not awarding me, some few years before, a prize for declamation, for which I competed at Harvard, and which, with the modesty I have always credited myself with, I fancied I had deserved. Mr. Adams was one of the appointed umpires.

But all this only by way of a beginning. Not another word about myself. So much, I hope, will be pardoned to my five-and-eighty

years.

Mr. Adams himself was never a partisan. By nature and by principle he was incapable of anything like political intrigue. Siding with one party one day and with the opposite party the next, he was charged with seeking to conciliate his enemies. On one occasion, at a dinnerparty, the toast was, "John Quincy Adams, may he live to confound his foes." "As he has done his friends," Daniel Webster, who was present, was reported to have added, sotto voce.

Originally Mr. Adams ranked with the old Federalists, who never forgave him for taking office under President Jefferson. He was, in fact, on that side which never wholly sided with either of the great parties, and on which, as Edward Everett said, the kicks were out of all proportion to the coppers.

Mr. Adams was the defender of General Jackson in the matter of the Seminole War, which the general was considered to have carried on with too high a hand. Mr. Adams's defence was pronounced by the

general himself, in a note to a friend to whom he sent a copy, "a complete justification of justice and moral rule." There can be no doubt that the note was the general's own composition. But it is doubtful whether his warmest friends ever imagined that his very able state papers were his own work. They were believed to be written for him. He might have made his bow, as Pope did to Warburton, for finding more meaning in them than he himself was aware of.

After his great military successes, and before he was thought of for the Presidency, General Jackson visited Philadelphia. It was told of him that at a dinner-party in his honor some one said to him, "General, · they will want you for President by and by." "A h-ll of a President I should make!" he was reported to have answered,-a prediction which his enemies held was amply fulfilled. They accorded to him, moreover, the credit of not being blinded, by the intoxicating cup of his great popularity, at the time he uttered the prophecy, to his own Presidential disqualifications.

It was a memorable breakfast at which, with my friend the late Rev. Wm. Ware, then pastor of the First Unitarian Church in New York, I was honored in being a guest. The breakfast was given by the venerable John Vaughan in the rooms of the American Philosophical Society in Fifth Street below Chestnut, rooms in which Mr. Vaughan, being the Librarian of the Society, had his home. Mr. Adams, then ExPresident of the United States and member of the House of Representatives, it was in President Jackson's time,--Dr. Channing, Mr. Duponceau, Colonel Drayton of South Carolina, and one or two others, made up the party. party. We sat down at the table about 9 A.M. and rose from it about 1 P.M. Albert Gallatin came in before we broke up. My friend Wm. Ware and I, being the youngest present, scarcely opened our mouths save to put something into them, and not much for that, having a more refreshing repast, bountifully as the board was laden with the food that perisheth, the conversation being chiefly between Mr. Adams and Dr. Channing. It turned at one time upon the Presidential power of nomination, Mr. Calhoun having sought to restrict it shortly before by a resolution introduced in the Senate, concerning which Dr. Channing expressed an unfavorable opinion. Mr. Adams differed from Dr. Channing, and discoursed at large. The President, he thought, must be glad to be relieved of that function of his office, as, in discharging it, he was pretty sure to make a host of enemies for one friend, since he could nominate only one man for any given office, disappointing a troop of candidates.

After Colonel Drayton left the table, Mr. Adams spoke of the high character and ability of the gentlemen sent to Congress by South Carolina. They had been his determined opponents. A pleased expression sparkled in his watery eyes as, slowly rubbing his knee, he said that there was not one of them that had not come to him and made the amende honorable, a fact alike creditable to them and to him. How true it was I happened to know, having been told once by Mr. Silsbee, then the Massachusetts Senator, that once at an evening party in Washington Mr. Adams's son and secretary told him that he had just seen a remarkable sight. As he came out of his father's door Mr. Calhoun went

up the steps and rung the bell. Mr. Calhoun, young Adams said, had not spoken to his father for four years. The next day in the Senatechamber Mr. Calhoun told Mr. Silsbee of the great pleasure he had had in a visit to Mr. Adams.

Mr. Silsbee further told me that one evening, when he was at Mr. Adams's, when Mr. Adams was President, with Mr. Clay and one or two others, Mr. Adams took up from the table a message he was to send to the Senate the next day, nominating Directors of the United States Bank in New York. The President read their names. At one name Mr. Clay interrupted him with, "Sir, don't you know that that man is a violent political opponent of yours?" To which the President replied, "I am sorry, but he has the reputation of being an able financier. I cannot appoint men for myself, but for the country." "Well," returned Mr. Clay, "you have more of the milk of human kindness than I; but I'd be d-d if I would appoint him!"

Mr. Adams, as is well known, was elected to the Presidency by the House of Representatives, as the Constitution prescribes when there fails to be an election by the Electoral College. The case, thus provided for, had then occurred. The popular majority was then largely in favor of General Jackson. In acknowledging the formal notification of his election Mr. Adams said that, under the circumstances, he would decline the office, but "his respect for the forms of the Constitution forbade." He spoke, I doubt not, the simple truth, though his enemies refused to appreciate his motive. It is the law-abiding spirit that distinguishes this people, and of which Mr. Adams then gave an example, that has been in all our trials the salvation of the Republic. It has amounted almost to a superstition, disposing the people to submit to so inhuman an enactment as the Fugitive Slave Law: that iniquity framed into a law. There was great opposition to permitting colored persons to ride in the street-cars. Colored women during the war were turned out of the street-cars when they were on the way to visit their husbands and brothers in camp, drilling for the defence of the country. But as soon as our Legislature passed a law requiring railroads to recognize no distinction of color, instantly all the trouble ceased.

When Mr. Adams passed from the Presidential chair to a seat in the House of Representatives, he was generally considered as taking a step downward; but it was soon shown to be a step upward, to a more commanding position before the country. No President, save the first and the sixteenth, has risen above him. There he fought the battle for Freedom and the Right of Petition. Had he retired from the Presidency to private life we should never have known the grand stuff of which he was made. He would have left hardly any other memory than that of a martinet, his whole previous life, from early manhood, having been spent in office. But, as a member of Congress, the valor, the eloquence of the old man, in a word, the fiery heart of him, which he mourned over, flashed its light over the whole country. As has been said of Junius, it might be said of Mr. Adams. They who attacked him in debate or sought to defend themselves against him were in the condition of a man attempting to resist the lightning with a sword of steel and only bringing down the thunderbolt with concen

trated force. It was proposed to expel him from the House, and he crushed the attempt under his scorn and ridicule. One of the stories told of him was that on one occasion, when he was thus dealing with his opponents, one of them, uneasy under the lash, left his seat and went to the desk of a fellow-member and asked him what he thought of it all. "What do I think of it?" was the reply. "I think you puppies have driven the old man into deep water; and if you don't look out he will drown every mother's son of you."

If men were ready to use the experience of others, it would be most desirable that every generation should be well acquainted with the history of the generation preceding it. But the history of an age can never be truthfully written until after a hundred years or more. Were it otherwise, could the history of the thirty years' war of opinion that preceded the bloody crisis in which it resulted be made familiar to the present voting generation of young men, one cannot help thinking the present political condition of the country would not be just what it is now. Then, in those anti-slavery times, it was seen, by the demoralization of our ablest Northern politicians, that the advocacy of the domestic institution of the South was as much more injurious to the whites than to the blacks as it is to commit or defend wrong than to suffer it. But I don't know how it may have fared better and at less cost with the holy cause of freedom than it has done. We are surrounded now by a great cloud of witnesses, with our martyred President at their head, to cheer this great nation on in the race that is set before it. The country is in wiser hands than ours. He who makes the wrath of man to praise Him subjugates all the evil passions to His service. Providence, as was once said by Lydia Maria Child, whose voice was one of the earliest and most powerful raised in behalf of equal justice, often uses instruments which she would not touch with a ten-foot pole.

W. H. Furness.

LUCIFER.

HEN I went out of Paradise,

I turned a backward glance to see
Two flaming swords: once, twice, and thrice,
I turned and turned, ere I could flee.

Then down the darkened path I sped,
And heard heaven's gate behind me close:

What matter then if, quick or dead,
The world of men before me rose?

What matter now indeed, to-day,
These lower honors, lower gains?
Above me shines that higher way-

I might have walked the heavenly plains!

Nora Perry.

THE GRAND DUKE'S RUBIES.

HERE is in New York a club called the Balmoral, which has two peculiarities, no one ever goes there much before midnight, and it is the only place in town where you can get anything fit to eat at four o'clock in the morning. The members are politicians of the higher grade, men about town, and a sprinkle of nondescripts. In the unhallowed inspiration of a moment, Alphabet Jones, the novelist,— in polite society Mr. A. B. Fenwick Chisolm-Jones,-baptized it the Smallpox, a name which has stuck tenaciously, the before-mentioned members being usually pitted-against each other. Of the many rooms of the club, one, it should be explained, is the most enticing. It is situated on an upper floor, and the siren that presides therein is a long table dressed in green. Her name is Baccarat.

One night last March, Alphabet Jones rattled up to the door in a vagabond hansom. He was thirsty, impecunious, and a trifle tired. He had been to a cotillon, where he had partaken of champagne, and he wanted to get the taste of it out of his throat. He needed five hundred dollars, and in his card-case there was only two hundred and fifty. The bar of the Athenæum Club he knew at that hour was closed, possible money-lenders were in bed, and it was with the idea of killing the two birds of the legend that he sought the Balmoral.

He encountered there no difficulty in slaking his thirst; and when, in one draught, which brought to his tonsils a suggestion of art, science, and Wagner combined, he swallowed a brandy-and-soda, he felt better, and looked about to see who might be present. The room which he had entered was on what is called the parlor-floor. It was long, highceiled, comfortably furnished, and somewhat dim. At the furthermost end three men were seated, two of whom he recognized, the one as Sumpter Leigh, the other as Colonel Barker, but the third he did not remember to have seen before. Some Westerner, he thought; for Jones prided himself on knowing every one worth knowing in New York, and, it may be added, in several other cities as well.

He took out his card-case and thumbed the roll of bills reflectively. If he went up-stairs, he told himself, he might double the amount in two minutes. But then, again, he might lose it. Yet, if he did, might not five hundred be as easily borrowed as two hundred and fifty?

"It's brutal," he mused, "to be so hard up. Literature doesn't pay. I might better set up as publisher, open a drug-shop, turn grocer, do anything, in fact, which is brainless and remunerative, than attempt to earn a living by the sweat of my pen. There's that Interstate Magazine: the editor sent me a note by a messenger this morning, asking for a story, adding that the messenger would wait while I wrote it. Evidently he thinks me three parts stenographer and the rest kaleidoscope. What is a good synonyme for an editor, anyway ?"