After returning from Congress, Mr. Ames passed a life of almost unbroken retirement. In 1798 he was appointed commissioner to the Cherokees, an office he was obliged to refuse. In 1800 he was a member of the Governor's Council, and in the same year delivered a eulogy on Washington, before the Legislature. He was chosen in 1805, President of Harvard College, but ill health, and a disinclination to change his habits of life, led him to decline the honor. He had also resumed the practice of his profession with ardor, but the state of his health compelled him gradually to drop it; and towards the close of his life, he was glad to throw it aside altogether. Mr. Ames was not much of a traveller, though getting back and forth between Dedham and Philadelphia, which he used to do in his own conveyance, was no small matter in those days. He visited among his acquaintances in the neighborhood, at Christopher Gore's in Waltham, at George Cabot's in Brookline, and at Salem, where Timothy Pickering and others of his friends resided. He was also in the habit of driving to Boston in his gig two or three times a week, when his health permitted, and passing the day. But he took few long journeys. We hear of him at Newport in 1795, in Virginia visiting the mineral springs for his health, in the following year, and in Connecticut in 1800; and he speaks in one of his letters of "jingling his bells as far as Springfield" as a matter of common occurrence. His wife's relations lived there, among others the husband of her sister, Mr. Thomas Dwight, at whose house Mr. Ames was a frequent guest.