The processions and celebrations in Lafayette's honor culminated in the ceremony for which he had crossed the Atlantic, the laying of the corner-stone at Bunker Hill. Pious people had said hopefully that the Lord could not let it rain on such a day; and their faith was justified, for the weather was perfect. We are told that on the 17th of June "everything that had wheels and everything that had legs" moved in the direction of the monument. Accounts tell of endless organizations [Pg 268]and of "miles of spectators," until there seemed to be not room for another person to sit or stand. The same chaplain who had lifted up his young voice in prayer in the darkness on Cambridge Common before the men marched off to battle was there in the sunlight to raise his old hands in blessing. Daniel Webster, who had not been born when the battle was fought, was there to make the oration. He could move his hearers as no other American has been able to do, playing upon their emotions as upon an instrument, and never was his skill greater than upon that day. He set the key of feeling in the words, "Venerable men," addressed to the forty survivors of the battle, a gray-haired group, sitting together in the afternoon light. Lafayette had met this little company in a quiet room before the ceremonies began and had greeted each as if he were in truth a personal friend. After his part in the ceremony was over he elected to sit with them instead of in the place prepared for him. "I belong there," he said, and there he sat, his chestnut wig shining in the gray company. While Webster's eloquence worked its spell, and pride and joy and pain even to the point of tears swept over the thousands of upturned faces as cloud shadows sweep across a meadow, Lafayette must have remembered another scene, a still greater assembly, even more tense with feeling, in which he had been a central figure: that fête of the Federation on the Champs de Mars. Surely no other man in history has been allowed to feel himself so intimately a part of two nations in their moments of patriotic exaltation. [Pg 269]XXVIII LEAVE-TAKINGS Though the celebration at Bunker Hill was the crowning moment of Lafayette's stay in America, he remained three months longer, sailing home in September, 1825. The last weeks were spent in and near Washington. Here he had fitted so perfectly into the scheme of life that his comings and goings had ceased to cause remark, except as a pleasant detail of the daily routine. Perhaps this is the subtlest compliment Americans paid him. One of the mottoes in a hall decorated in his honor had read, "_Où peut-on être mieux qu'au sein de sa famille?_" "Where can a man feel more at home than in the bosom of his family?"--and this attitude of Washingtonians toward him showed how completely he had been adopted as one of themselves.