Page:Republican Court by Rufus Griswold.djvu/309

and unfailing wit made him everywhere a favorite. He was much attached to his family. While in London, in 1786, he dined on one occasion at the ambassador's. When he entered the drawing-room Mrs. Adams gave into his hands several letters which had been received for him. He carried them to the light, broke their seals, and threw them on the table, exclaiming, "Not one from my wife! I have lost two letters from her. The devil! I would rather have found two lines from her than ten folios from any one else." Washington, who placed him on the bench, was very fond of his society, and frequently drove out to Belmont, his country house, to enjoy an unceremonious, vivacious and recreative intercourse with him, walking with him sometimes for hours under the dark grove of hemlocks which an earlier generation of the Peters family had planted there.

The genial humorist, Francis Hopkinson, author of "The Battle of the Kegs," was a little older than Judge Peters, and like him had the honor of having been appointed by Washington one of the federal judges for the district of Pennsylvania. His powers of pleasing were remarkable, and the displays of his satirical wit were always marked by refinement and an amiable spirit.

The "sage Rittenhouse" was nearly sixty, and had just been elected successor of Franklin as President of the American Philosophical society. William Bartram was living at his famous botanic garden, and had just published his travels through the Carolinas and Floridas. John Fitch, who had invented the steamboat, was wearying incredulous people with applications for money for new experiments, and with his confident predictions of the time when the Atlantic should be crossed by steam in a fortnight. Soon after, baffled and disheartened, he retired to Kentucky and selected a grave beside the Ohio, that his restless spirit might be lulled to repose through coming ages by the music of steam engines ascending and descending that majestic river.