Some things never change........................

     Adams traveled up to Boston in the first days of September [1824].  His father had now reached the age of ninety.  "His sight is so dim that he can neither write nor read," Adams found.  Mentally, however, this remarkable old man was unimpaired.  "His memory yet remains strong, his judgment is sound, and his interest in conversation considerable."  John Adams continued to dictate letters, especially to his grandchildren.  The two men rode around the neighborhood, visiting the modest homes, across the street from one another, in which each had been born, a setting that evoked for both of them an eighteenth-century world purer and more noble that the one in which they now lived.

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit