Nevertheless, I believe that it is true, for it seems to me likely that though Mr. Carroll used the subscription “of Carrollton” in conducting his affairs at home, where there was chance for confusion between his son Charles, his cousin Charles, and himself, he might well have been inclined to omit it from a public document, as to the signers of which there could be no confusion.  Further, the fact that he never told the story to Latrobe does not invalidate it, for as every man (and every man’s wife) knows, men do not remember to tell everything to their wives, and it is still less likely that they tell everything to their biographers.  Further still, Mr. Winthrop visited Mr. Carroll just before the latter’s death, and as he certainly did not invent the story it seems probable that he got it from “the Signer” himself.  Last, I like the story and intend to believe it anyway—­which, it occurs to me, is the best reason of all, and the one most resembling my reason for being more or less Episcopalian and Republican.

Latrobe tells us that Mr. Carroll was, in his old age, “a small, attenuated old man, with a prominent nose and somewhat receding chin, and small eyes that sparkled when he was interested in conversation.  His head was small and his hair white, rather long and silky, while his face and forehead were seamed with wrinkles.”

From the same source, and others, we glean the information that he was a charming and courteous gentleman, that he practised early rising and early retiring, was regular at meals, and at morning and evening prayer in the chapel, that he took cold baths and rode horseback, and that for several hours each day he read the Greek, Latin, English, or French classics.

At the age of eighty-three he rode a horse in a procession in Baltimore, carrying in one hand a copy of the Declaration of Independence; and six years later, when by that strange freak of chance ex-Presidents Adams and Jefferson died simultaneously on July 4, leaving Mr. Carroll the last surviving signer of the Declaration, he took part in a memorial parade and service in their memory.  In 1826, at the age of eighty-nine, he was elected a director of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company, and at the age of ninety he laid the foundation stone marking the commencement of that railroad—­the first important one in the United States.  We are told that at this time Mr. Carroll was erect in carriage and that he could see and hear as well as most men.  In 1832, having lived to within five years of a full century, having been active in the Revolution, having seen the War of 1812, he died less than thirty years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and was buried in the chapel of the manor house.