of Aaron Burr, Martin Van Buren, and Edward
Livingston, as a "man of the people." They had persuaded him to
resign his seat in the Senate of the United States, where he might
have made political mistakes, and retire to his farm in Tennessee,
while they flooded the country with accounts of his military exploits
and his social good qualities. Daniel Webster told Samuel Breck,
as the latter records in his diary, that he knew more than fifty
members of Congress who had expended and pledged all they were
worth in setting up presses and employing other means to forward
Jackson's election.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two of the three survivors of the
signers of the Declaration of Independence, passed hence on the
Fourth of July, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of their signing
the Magna Charta of our Republic. Their names had been inseparably
connected in the minds and upon the lips of the people, as their
labors were united in bringing about the events of the Revolution
and its final triumph. Mr. Jefferson was the writer, Mr. Adams
the orator, of the Congress of '76. The one penned the Declaration
of Independence, the other was pronounced "the pillar of its support
and its ablest advocate and defender." Mr. Jefferson called Mr.
Adams "the Colossus of the Congress," the most earnest, laborious
member of the body, and its animating spirit. For the loss of
these men, though they fell as a ripe shock of corn falleth--both
having arrived at an advanced age--Mr. Adams over ninety--the whole
nation clothed itself in mourning.

CHAPTER II.
TRAVELING IN "YE OLDEN TIME."

The old stage route between Boston and New York, before John Quincy
Adams was President, passed through Worcester, Springfield, Hartford,
and Norwalk. Passengers paid ten dollars for a seat and were fifty-
six hours or more on the road. This gave way about 1825 to the
steamboat line via Providence, which for five dollars carried
passengers from Boston to New York in twenty-four hours.

Stage books for the Providence line were kept in Boston at offices
in different parts of the city, where those wishing to go the next
day registered their names. These names were collected and brought
to the central stage office in the Marlboro Hotel at ten o'clock
each night, where they were arranged into stage-loads, each made
up from those residing in the same part of the city. At four
o'clock in the morning a man started from the stage office in a
chaise to