name of God, I ask you to send your petitions to me! (Tremendous cheering.) I hope this is not trespassing too far on politics. (Laughter, and cheers.) I unhesitatingly promise you, one and all, that if I can in any way serve you in that station, I will do it most cheerfully; regarding it as the choicest blessing of God, if I shall thus be enabled to make some just return for the kind attentions which you have this day bestowed upon me.”

In his route homeward, Mr. Adams was received and entertained in a very handsome manner by the people of Pittsfield, Mass.  He was addressed by Hon. George N. Briggs, who alluded, in eloquent terms, to his long and distinguished public services.  Mr. Adams, in reply, spoke of the scenes amidst which he had passed his early youth, and of the influence which they exerted in forming his character and shaping his purposes.  “In 1775,” said he, “the minute men from a hundred towns in the province were marching, at a moment’s warning, to the scene of opening war.  Many of them called at my father’s house in Quincy, and received the hospitality of John Adams.  All were lodged in the house which the house would contain; others in the barns, and wherever they could find a place.  There were then in my father’s kitchen some dozen or two of pewter spoons; and I well recollect going into the kitchen and seeing some of the men engaged in running those spoons into bullets for the use of the troops!  Do you wonder,” said he, “that a boy of seven years of age, who witnessed this scene, should be a patriot?”

In the fall of the same year, Mr. Adams received an invitation from the Cincinnati Astronomical Society, to visit that city, and assist in the ceremony of laying the corner stone of an observatory, to be erected on an eminence called Mount Ida.  The invitation was accepted.  On his journey to Cincinnati, the same demonstrations of respect, the same eagerness to honor the aged patriarch were manifested in the various cities and towns through which he passed, as on his summer tour.

324 Life of John Quincy Adams.

The ceremony of laying the corner stone took place on the 9th of November, 1843.  Mr. Adams delivered an address on the occasion, replete with eloquence, wisdom, philosophy, and religion.  The following beautiful extract will afford a specimen:—­

“The various difficult, and, in many respects, opposite motives which have impelled mankind to the study of the stars, have had a singular effect in complicating and confounding the recommendation of the science.  Religion, idolatry, superstition, curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, the passion for penetrating the secrets of nature, the warfare of the huntsman by night and by day against the beast of the forest and of the field, the meditations of the shepherd in the custody and wanderings of his flocks, the influence of the revolving seasons of the year, and the successive garniture of the firmament upon the labors of the husbandman, upon the seed time and the harvest, the blooming of flowers, the ripening of the vintage, the polar pilot of the navigator, and the mysterious magnet of the mariner—­all, in harmonious action, stimulate the child of earth and of heaven to interrogate the dazzling splendors of the sky, to reveal to him the laws of their own existence.