Before we trace his connection with public affairs in these closing years, let us take one look at him, through the eyes of a disinterested but keen observer.  John Bernard, an English actor, who had come to this country in the year when Washington left the presidency, was playing an engagement with his company at Annapolis, in 1798.  One day he mounted his horse and rode down below Alexandria, to pay a visit to an acquaintance who lived on the banks of the Potomac.  When he was returning, a chaise in front of him, containing a man and a young woman, was overturned, and the occupants were thrown out.  As Bernard rode to the scene of the accident, another horseman galloped up from the opposite direction.  The two riders dismounted, found that the driver was not hurt, and succeeded in restoring the young woman to consciousness; an event which was marked, Bernard tells us, by a volley of invectives addressed to her unfortunate husband.  “The horse,” continues Bernard, “was now on his legs, but the vehicle still prostrate, heavy in its frame, and laden with at least half a ton of luggage.  My fellow-helper set me an example of activity in relieving it of the internal weight; and when all was clear, we grasped the wheel between us, and to the peril of our spinal columns righted the conveyance.  The horse was then put in, and we lent a hand to help up the luggage.  All this helping, hauling, and lifting occupied at least half an hour, under a meridian sun, in the middle of July, which fairly boiled the perspiration out of our foreheads.”  The possessor of the chaise beguiled the labor by a full personal history of himself and his wife, and when the work was done invited the two Samaritans to go with him to Alexandria, and take a drop of “something sociable.”  This being declined, the couple mounted into the chaise and drove on.  “Then,” says Bernard, “my companion, after an exclamation at the heat, offered very courteously to dust my coat, a favor the return of which enabled me to take deliberate survey of his person.  He was a tall, erect, well-made man, evidently advanced in years, but who appeared to have retained all the vigor and elasticity resulting from a life of temperance and exercise.  His dress was a blue coat buttoned to his chin, and buckskin breeches.  Though the instant he took off his hat I could not avoid the recognition of familiar lineaments, which indeed I was in the habit of seeing on every sign-post and over every fireplace, still I failed to identify him, and to my surprise I found that I was an object of equal speculation in his eyes.”  The actor evidently did not have the royal gift of remembering faces, but the stranger possessed that quality, for after a moment’s pause he said, “Mr. Bernard, I believe,” and mentioned the occasion on which he had seen him play in Philadelphia.  He then asked Bernard to go home with him for a couple of hours’ rest, and pointed out the house in the distance.  At last Bernard knew to whom he was speaking. “’Mount Vernon!’ I