[p. 10] I have not done justice to Mr Webster's words, look and manner. No words of mine can paint them to you. It always delights me to see him, and I was never so charmed with him as this day. To all the wit and power of mind of all the other gentlemen, he super-adds a tenderness and unaffected feeling that is seldom seen in his sex, and especially at his time of life, and in his pursuits. We again entered the boat, and pursued our course a few miles, stopping near a house1 which we did not enter, but where coffee was served in the boat. The children had another cotillion while the boat was descending the lock. We walked a short distance, got into the boat again, took coffee listened to sweet strains, saw the sun descend and the moon rise, and reached our place of debarkation just after the last tints of daylight had faded.Other parts of Miss Searle's letter are devoted to expressions of her intense enjoyment of the day as it passed, and its delightful retrospection, the chatty intimacy naturally existing between sisters, and her personal judgment of the various persons of the picnic party. As we read of the events of that perfect day, a hundred years ago, we find ourselves conjecturing as to whether, in after years, when, after some great debate in the Senate where his magnificent oratory had swept all before it, the ‘great expounder’ sought the quiet of his room, his thoughts would revert from the triumphs of forensic battles to those sylvan hours when he distributed to the ladies of that summer picnic party in Medford the water-lilies which his eloquence had inspired others to gather.
C. H. L.
