Page:Republican Court by Rufus Griswold.djvu/200

twenty-two and a half inches long and seventeen and a half wide, of an oval shape, without any ornament except a small beading on the edge of the rim. The state coach was the finest carriage in the city. It was usually drawn by four horses, but when it conveyed the President to Federal Hall, always by six. The body was of the shape of a hemisphere, and it was cream-colored, and ornamented with cupids, supporting festoons, and with borderings of flowers around the panels.

The President afterwards removed to the commodious house owned by Mr. McComb, since known as Bunker's Hotel, in Broadway, near the Bowling Green. The situation was more pleasant and the house was larger and more convenient than that in Cherry street. His office for the transaction of business was here on the first floor, on the right hand of the hall, as it was entered from the street, and the drawing-rooms were on the left. The rent of the house in Broadway was regarded as extremely high; it was twenty-five hundred dollars a year.

The Vice President occupied Mrs. Jephson's beautiful rural residence at Richmond Hill. It was the most delightful place on the island, and suited better than any other those ideas of official distinction which Mr. Adams was said to have acquired abroad. Early in the revolution it was General Washington's head-quarters, and he evinced a profound emotion when revisiting its chambers and the venerable oaks about it, soon after it came into the Vice President's possession. Mrs. Adams describes it in a letter to her sister, Mrs. Shaw, as "a situation where the hand of nature has so lavishly displayed her beauties, that she has left scarcely any thing for her handmaid, art, to perform." "The house in which we reside," she says, "is situated upon a hill, the avenue to which is interspersed with forest trees, under which a shrubbery, rather too luxuriant and wild, has taken shelter, owing to its having been de-