Page:Republican Court by Rufus Griswold.djvu/158

the way before him. In the evening he acknowledged these elegant compliments in a brief note, in which he said: "General Washington cannot leave this place without expressing his acknowledgments to the matrons and young ladies who received him in so novel and grateful a manner at the Triumphal Arch, for the exquisite sensations he experienced in that affecting moment. The astonishing contrast between his former and his actual situation at the same spot, the elegant taste with which it was adorned for the present occasion, and the innocent appearance of the white-robed choir who met him with the gratulatory song, have made such an impression on his remembrance as, he assures them, will never be effaced."

Having crossed New Jersey, "Washington was received at Elizabethtown Point, early on the morning of the twenty-third, in accordance with a previous arrangement, by a committee of both houses of Congress, with whom were the Chancellor of the State, the Adjutant General, the Recorder of the City, and Mr, Jay, Secretary for Foreign Affairs, General Knox, Secretary of War, Samuel Osgood, Arthur Lee, and Walter Livingston, Commissioners of the Treasury, and Ebenezer Hazard, Postmaster General — these heads of departments continuing to act until new arrangements should be made under the constitutional government. A magnificent barge had been constructed for the occasion, and was manned by thirteen master pilots, in white uniforms, under Commodore Nicholson, to convey the President and his suite to New York. Two other barges had been fitted up for the Board of the Treasury, the Secretaries, and other dignitaries. The passage from Elizabethtown is graphically described in a hitherto unpublished letter addressed to his wife the next day by Elias Boudinot, Chairman of the Committee of Congress. "You must have observed," he writes, "with what a propitious gale we left the shore, and glided with