Quincy over the body of one President and the ashes of another.

The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official
ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the
boy was taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a
Eulogy. Like all Mr. Everett's orations, it was an admirable
piece of oratory, such as only an admirable orator and scholar
could create; too good for a ten-year-old boy to appreciate at
its value; but already the boy knew that the dead President could
not be in it, and had even learned why he would have been out of
place there; for knowledge was beginning to come fast. The shadow
of the War of 1812 still hung over State Street; the shadow of
the Civil War to come had already begun to darken Faneuil Hall.
No rhetoric could have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his
subject. How could he say there, to an assemblage of Bostonians
in the heart of mercantile Boston, that the only distinctive mark
of all the Adamses, since old Sam Adams's father a hundred and
fifty years before, had been their inherited quarrel with State
Street, which had again and again broken out into riot,
bloodshed, personal feuds, foreign and civil war, wholesale
banishments and confiscations, until the history of Florence was
hardly more turbulent than that of Boston? How could he whisper
the word Hartford Convention before the men who had made it? What
would have been said had he suggested the chance of Secession and
Civil War?

Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing
face to face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early
Christian. What was he? -- where was he going? Even then he felt
that something was wrong, but he concluded that it must be