flow copiously--"Scarcely a dry eye but
Washington's, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day,"
wrote Adams to his wife.

With a little tinge of evident jealousy, Adams again wrote to the same
correspondent, a few days afterward, saying: "It is the general report
that there was more weeping than there has ever been at the
representation of any tragedy. But whether it was from grief or joy,
whether from the loss of their beloved president, or from the accession
of an unbeloved one, or from the pleasure of exchanging presidents
without tumult, or from the novelty of the thing, or from the sublimity
of it arising from the multitude present, or whatever other cause, I
know not. One thing I know, I am a being of too much sensibility to act
any part well in such an exhibition. Perhaps there is little danger of
my having such another scene to feel or behold.

"The stillness and silence astonishes me. Everybody talks of the
tears, the full eyes, the streaming eyes, the trickling eyes, &c.,
but all is enigma beyond. No one descends to particulars to say why
or wherefore; I am, therefore, left to suppose that it is all grief
for the loss of their beloved."

When Washington left the hall and entered his carriage, the great
audience followed, and were joined by an immense crowd in the streets,
who shouted long and loud as the retiring president and his suite moved
toward his dwelling. The new president and all others were forgotten in
that moment of veneration for the beloved friend, upon whose face few in
that vast assemblage would ever look again. "I followed him in the crowd
to his own door," said the late President Duer, of Columbia college,
"where, as he turned to address the multitude, his countenance assumed a
serious and almost melancholy expression, his voice failed him, his
eyes were suffused with tears, and only by his gestures could he
indicate his thanks, and convey his farewell blessing to the people."

The merchants of Philadelphia, to testify their love for Washington,
gave to him a splendid banquet and other entertainments that evening, in
the Amphitheatre, which had been decorated with appropriate paintings by
Charles Willson Peale, who, twenty-five years before, had painted, at
Mount Vernon, the first portrait ever drawn of Washington, in the
costume of a Virginia colonel. One of the newspapers of the day thus
describes a compliment that was paid to the first presiden