in her husband--was an intellectual and high-bred center, a rendezvous for
the best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses may be said to
have succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social, semi-literary and
semi-political society.

There was a trio--I used to call them the Three Musketeers of Culture--John
Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an interesting and
inseparable trinity--Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and Charles Sumner not
more so--and it was worth while to let them have the floor and to hear them
talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician should be; Hay, helterskelter,
the real man of the world crossed on a Western stock; and Adams, something
of a literatteur, a statesman and a cynic.

John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry at
dinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early volumes of
his History of the United States: "I am not disappointed, for how could an
Adams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?"

While he was writing this history Adams said to me: "There is an old
villain--next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time--a
Kentuckian--don't say he was a kinsman of yours!--whose papers, if he
left any, I want to see."

"To whom are you referring?" I asked with mock dignity.

"To John Adair," he answered.

"Well," said I, "John Adair married my grandmother's sister and I can put
you in the way of getting whatever you require."