[Illustration: _Old Carlyle Mansion, Alexandria_]
consisted usually of oatcake and lemonade, and one of his amusements was to play horse with a little grandchild, who used to drive him up and down the somber corridors with a switch.
Albeit Adams and Jefferson became, late in life, the warmest of friends, no love was lost between them during the period when both were active in politics. Adams, who would have been gratified to receive, like Washington, a second term, was not disposed to “enact the captive chief in the procession of the victor,” so he did not stay to see Jefferson inaugurated, but at daylight of the fourth of March, 1801, left Washington for Boston. There was no need for such haste to escape, for Jefferson, as the high priest of democratic simplicity, had no procession; though the cheerful little fiction about his riding down Pennsylvania Avenue alone, and hitching his horse to a sapling in front of the Capitol while he went in to be sworn, received its death-blow long ago. The truth is, he had no use for a horse. He was boarding in New Jersey Avenue, where he had lived for the latter part of his term as Vice-president. A few minutes before noon on inauguration day he set out on foot, in company with several Congressmen who were his fellow boarders, and walked the block or so to the Capitol, where he was escorted by a committee to the Senate chamber and there took the oath of office and delivered his address. Then he walked back again to his boarding-house, and at dinner occupied his customary seat at the foot of the table. A visitor from Baltimore complimented him on his address and “wished him joy” as President. “I should advise you,” was his smiling response, “to follow my example on nuptial occasions, when I always tell the bridegroom that I will wait till the end of the year before offering my congratulations.”
The accommodations in the President’s House were somewhat better by the time Mr. Jefferson moved in than they were when the Adams family opened it, yet he seems to have been more or less cramped during most of his two terms--owing, doubtless, to the continued presence of mechanics and building materials in the incomplete parts of the house. When the British Minister called in court costume to present his credentials, he was received, with his convoy the Secretary of State, in a space so narrow that he had to back out of one end of it to make room for the President to enter at the other. One of the legation described Jefferson as “a tall man, with a very red, freckled face and gray, neglected hair; his manners were good natured and rather friendly, though he had somewhat of a cynical expression of countenance. He wore a blue coat, a thick, gray-colored hairy waistcoat with a red under-waistcoat lapped over it, green velveteen breeches with pearl buttons, yarn stockings with slippers down at the heels, his appearance being very much like that of a tall, raw-boned farmer.” On the other hand, an admiring contemporary insists that his dress was “plain, unstudied and sometimes old-fashioned in its form,” but “always of the finest materials,” and that “in his personal habits he was fastidious and neat.” So there you are!