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a soldier in the British army under Braddock, afterwards commander-in-chief of the American forces, and finally President of the United States, was essentially a splendid horseman; and as we read the sketches of his receptions in New York and Philadelphia, the effect must have been most impressive. On the 18th of November, 1783, the British army retired from New York, and the American troops, still in service, entered from the opposite direction, General Washington riding at the head of the procession. That scene must have been very like the pageant described by Shakespeare in "Richard the Second" when Bolingbroke passed through London; and if you will pardon me, I will paraphrase it:

Then, as I said, our leader, Washington,

Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed,
Which its aspiring rider seemed to know,
With slow but stately pace kept on his course,
While all tongues cried, God save thee, Washington!
You would have thought the very windows spoke,

So many greedy looks of young and old

Through casements darted their desiring eyes
Upon his visage; and that all the walls
With painted imagery had said at once,
Jesus preserve thee! Welcome, Washington!
Whilst he, from one side to the other turning,
Bare-headed, lower than his proud steed's neck,
Bespoke them thus: I thank you, countrymen;
And thus still doing, thus he passed along.

A succession of brilliant celebrations followed this entry of the Father of his Country into New York city. Governor Clinton gave several jubilee dinners; a splendid display of fireworks, the first ever seen in America, came off at Bowling Green; and on the 4th of December, 1783, Washington bade the officers a final farewell at Francis's Tavern, in Broad Street. It was a most touching scene. After this ceremony he walked to White Hall, entered the barge which conveyed him to Paulus's Hook; then, turning to his friends, who stood uncovered

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upon the shore, he waved his hat and bade them a silent adieu. While in Philadelphia he rode out frequently to Belmont Mansion, the residence of Chief-justice Peters, still standing in Fairmount Park. After the war he set off on horseback to see his lands in the Western country, and travelled in this manner seven hundred miles, along the routes of his early military experience, to the scene of Braddock's defeat at Fort Duquesne.

In 1775 the French sculptor Houdon came to Mount Vernon from France to model his celebrated statue, now at Richmond, the State capital of Virginia, near the later bronze equestrian figure of Washington executed by Crawford. Washington's state-carriages were highly ornamental. The one built in Philadelphia was drawn by six horses. In this, in 1791, he made his long journey to the South, accompanied as far as Delaware by Mr. Jefferson and General Knox. The statecoach he used in New York was built in that city; and in this, also drawn by six horses, he made his journey through New England. Near the end of his life, on the 29th of May, 1799, he wrote, "I begin my diurnal course with the sun;" and, having described his day's business, he proceeds, "By the time I have accomplished these matters, breakfast (a little after seven o'clock) is ready. This being over, I mount my horse and ride round my farms, which employ me until it is time to dress for dinner, at which I rarely miss seeing strange faces, come, as they say, out of respect to me. Pray, would not the word 'curiosity' answer as well?" Between ten and eleven o'clock on the night of Saturday, December 14, 1799, he expired.

John Adams, President after Washington, was an entirely different character. Although, of course, compelled by the primitive condition of the country to use the horse occasionally, he was so much of a student, scholar, and statesman that his career may have been called a rather secluded one. But his wife, Mrs. Adams, had many fashionable tastes, and was

forty-five when summoned from Europe by the selection of her husband as Vice-President. At that time they lived at Bush Hill, near Philadelphia; and nothing can be more amusing than her letter describing her journey from Philadelphia to Washington, through York and Maryland, when her husband became Chief Magistrate, and when our national capital was something like the capital of a new Western Territory to-day. Thomas Jefferson, who came immediately after Adams, and was eight years President of the United States-from 1801 to 1809-was as much a contrast to Adams as Adams was to Washington. Not a military man, he was essentially a horseman. When he was a lad, he not only played the fiddle, but doubtless took a part in more than one of the rustic races in his neighborhood. Twenty horses were to run a three-mile course for a prize of five pounds, "no one to put up a horse unless he had subscribed for the entertainment and put up half a pistole." Then a violin was to be played for by twenty fiddlers, "no person to have the liberty of playing unless he bring a fiddle with him." "He was a keen hunter-as eager after a fox as Washington himself," says the biographer. "Swift of foot and sound of wind, coming in fresh and alert after a long day's clambering hunt." He generally travelled on horseback, with his fiddle; and it was at a merry house in Hanover County where he met for the first time a jovial blade named Patrick Henry. Everybody in those primitive days owned or rode a horse, and Jefferson, like George Wythe, John Marshall, Henry Clay, John Randolph, and all his contemporaries and successors, was compelled to use this sort of manly exercise. You remember the story of his inauguration. He went to the capital without parade or ostentation. His son-in-law was completing the purchase of four coach-horses, price sixteen hundred dollars, with which the President-elect hoped to contend with the yellow mud of Washington; but as neither horses nor coach had arrived, he rode on horseback to the capital without a servant

in his train, dismounted without assistance, hitched the bridle of his horse to the palisades, walked in, and was sworn. You may also remember how the ladies tried to trap him into a levee at the Presidential Mansion. Jefferson was a practical Democrat, strongly averse to these hollow receptions. In order to compel him to resume them, the fashionable dames resorted in full force to the White House, to find that the President was out taking his habitual ride on horseback. They waited for his return, and as he entered the White House he was told of their errand, and immediately divined the motive. Without being disconcerted, all booted and spurred, covered with the dust of his ride, he went in to greet his fair guests. Charmed with his ease and grace, they forgot their indignation with him, and went away convinced that they had made a mistake in visiting the President without observing the rules of his household.

James Madison succeeded Jefferson in the Presidency, serving for eight years, from March 4, 1809. He almost broke down his health by his severe studies, and, although undoubtedly a horseman, as proved by his military services when the British attacked Washington during his Administration in 1814, he was so devoted to books that during his novitiate at Princeton College, in New Jersey, he allowed himself but three hours' sleep and devoted the day to study. James Monroe, his successor, also serving for eight years in the Presidency, was a brave soldier in the Revolutionary War, a pupil of Thomas Jefferson, and, although one of the ablest of the Virginia statesmen, accustomed to the perils of the field. Yet with all this, he agreed with John Quincy Adams in the dignified simplicity of his domestic administration. And John Quincy Adams, who came after him as President, in 1825, austere and cold as he was, was a regular horseman and swimmer and fisherman and pedestrian. If you will read through his own memoirs, edited by his son, Charles Francis Adams, and his matchless biogra

phy by William H. Seward, you will find that he relieved his prodigious labors and his omnivorous reading by daily exercise of all kinds.

After Adams came the Iron President-Old Hickory—a sinewy wrestler in his youth, the frontier pioneer, the fierce Indian warrior, a man who would fight at the drop of a hat, the general who whipped a trained British army with untrained troops behind cotton bags; who, so to speak, literally rode into the Presidency, and to his last hour preserved his indomitable nature. The turf was a source of profit as well as pleasure to Andrew Jackson. The early Nashville race-course at Clover Bottom, close to Jackson's store on Stone River, was the scene of many of his exploits. It was just large enough for a mile course, with space for spectators and their vehicles. Here he tried the paces of his renowned horse Truxtun, when he first brought him from Virginia; here he tried his racing colts; here, every spring and autumn, he attended the races, the most eager of the motley throng. The ownership of Truxtun, says Parton, from whose splendid biography I gather these facts, rendered Jackson the leader of the turf for years. Truxtun was conceded to be superior to any horse in that part of the West, and was called after Commodore Truxtun, then in the zenith of his popularity. In 1805 a great race was arranged between General Jackson's Truxtun and Captain Joseph Ervin's Ploughboy. The stakes were two thousand dollars; forfeit, eight hundred dollars. Six persons were interested in the race: Jackson, with his friends, on the side of Truxtun; Captain Ervin and his son-in-law, Charles Dickinson, on the side of Ploughboy. Before the day appointed, the latter withdrew their horse, and paid the forfeit. All was supposed to be at peace until a report reached Jackson's ears that Charles Dickinson had uttered disparaging words of Mrs. Jackson. A long correspondence ensued, full of bitterness, involving many persons, ending finally in a duel, which took place on Friday, May 30,

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