ccomplish
that end. He was the inveterate foe of oppression, and in
his later years, opposed every compromise with slavery. But
he had no sympathy with reforms which seemed to him to be
devised merely as political instruments to advance the fortunes
of persons or parties.

He had a huge respect for John Quincy Adams, a respect which
I have good reason to know was reciprocated. But he was by
no means Mr. Adams's blind follower. The ex-President, I think
about the year 1832, published a pamphlet in which he savagely
attacked the Masonic Order. He met Mr. Hoar in Boston and
asked him what he thought of it. Mr. Hoar answered: "It
seems to me, Mr. Adams, there is but one thing in the world
sillier than Masonry. That is Anti-Masonry."

Mr. Hoar used to relate with some amusement a dialogue he
had with a shrewd and witty old lawyer named Josiah Adams,
who shared the old Federalist dislike of his namesake, John
Quincy Adams. My father was talking quite earnestly in a
gathering of Middlesex lawyers and said: "I believe John Quincy
Adams means to be a Christian." "When?" inquired Josiah.

But I cannot draw the portraiture of this noble and stately
figure. George Herbert did it perfectly, long ago, in his
poem, "Constancy."

Old Dr. Lyman Beecher, the foremost champion in his day of
the old Orthodoxy, spent his life in combating what he deemed
the pestilent Unitarian heresy. He was the most famous preacher
in the country. Mr. Hoar was a pillar of Unitarianism. Yet
the Doctor came to know and honor his old antagonist. He
read in the Boston papers, late Saturday evening, that Mr.
Hoar was dying at Concord. Early Sunday morning before daybreak
he started, with his son-in-law, Professor Stowe, and drove
twenty miles to Concord. He got there just after Mr. Hoar's
death. He asked to go into the chamber where his old friend
lay. My sister said: "Father would have been glad to see
you, if he were alive." The Doctor gazed a moment, and then
said: "He's passed safe over, I haven't a doubt of it. He
was an Israelite indeed, in whom there was no guile."

CHAPTER IV
BOYHOOD IN CONCORD

I have never got over being a boy. It does not seem likely
that I ever shall. I have to-day, at the age of three score
and sixteen, less sense of my own dignity than I had when
at sixteen I walked for the first time into the College Chapel
at Harvard, clad as the statute required, in a "black or black-
mixed coat, with button