PARSON SMITH'S DAUGHTER T ABIGAIL HE life of Abigail Adams emphasizes very impressively the truth that in early New England the clergy and their families represented the gentry of the period. Abigail's father was all his life a poor minister. Called from his parish in Charlestown to take charge in August, 1734, of the First Church at Weymouth, his salary at the new parish was only £160 a year, in addition to which the parish munificently settled upon him later the sum of £300, 66 the latter to be paid £100 annually for three years, all in bills of credit." But if there was not a large income, there was a great deal of solid learning and quiet culture in the little Weymouth home where was born, November 11, 1744, the beautiful and intelligent girl who was to become the wife of one President of the United States, and the mother of another. As a young girl Abigail Smith did not enjoy great advantages. Had her health been better she might have availed herself of such limited educational opportunities as were open to girls of her day, but, delicate as she was, her parents thought it best not to send her away to school. In a letter written in 1817, the year before her death, she says, speaking of her own deficiencies: "My early education did not partake of the abundant opportunities which the present days offer, and which even our common country schools now afford. I never was sent to any school. I was always sick. Female education in the best families went no further than writing and arithmetic; in some few and rare instances, music and dancing." That the parson's sprightly daughter failed to make the most, however, of such chances of cultivation as did come her way, one cannot for a moment believe after reading her remarkable letters. She seems to have had a decidedly assimilative mind, and to have been very well able to obtain from intercourse with men and women of attainments whatever they might have to give. Her grandmother, Mrs. John Quincy, Abigail tells us, was one of her most valued teachers. This lady, the daughter of the Reverend John Norton, must certainly have had a truly wonderful mind. In the year 1795, Mrs. Adams tells her own daughter of the excellent lessons she received from her grandmother at a very early period of life. "I frequently think they made a more durable impression upon my mind than those which I received from my own parents. . . . I love and revere her memory; her lively, cheerful disposition animated all around her, while she edified all by her unaffected piety." Again, in another letter to the same person in 1808, she said: "I cherish her memory with holy veneration, whose maxims I have treasured up, whose virtues live in my remembrance; happy if I could say they have been transplanted into my life." It was probably at one of the pleasant social gatherings at Grandmother Quincy's hospitable mansion that Abigail first met John Adams, the son of a Braintree farmer, who had been born in the quaint old house now in the care of the Quincy Daughters of the Revolution, had been |