afterward President John Quincy Adams wrote of this transaction: "It was filial tenderness that gave the name. It was the name of one passing from earth to immortality. These have been among the strongest links of my attachment to the name of Quincy, and have been to me through life a perpetual admonition to do nothing unworthy of it.” At the time of the little John Quincy's birth, Mrs. Adams was the serene young woman of our picture, lovely, lovable, and carefully domestic. It was indeed a very quiet, happy life which she passed during these years of her early married life. Her husband, to be sure, was not with. her so constantly as she would have wished, for he was obliged to go about from place to place, following the circuit, after the custom of lawyers of his time, and even when not away from Massachusetts he practised in Boston, coming to his "still calm happy Braintree" only for the overSundays. The pathos of these enforced absences from her husband colours all Abigail Adams's letters. Again and again she writes of her suffering because removed from the man to whom she had given her heart. And he, scarcely less, bewails constantly the tumultuous conditions which made necessary a life very little domestic. All this, however, is brought out best in the documents themselves. Among the first of the letters from this devoted wife available to students, is that dated Braintree, August 15, 1774, sent to Mr. Adams, who, in company with the other delegates, had set out to attend the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. The lofty tone of the missive is most impressive: "I was much gratified upon the return of some of your friends from Water town, who gave me an account of your social dinner and friendly parting. May your return merit and meet with the grateful acknowledgment of every wellwisher to their country. Your task is difficult and important. Heaven direct and prosper you. I shall reckon over every week as they pass and rejoice at every Saturday evening. . . . Our little ones [other babies had come to play with son John] send their duty to their papa, and that which at all times and in all places evermore attends you is the most affectionate regard of your Abigail Adams." Four days later she writes: "The great distance between us makes the time appear very long to me. It seems already a month since you left me. The great anxiety I feel for my country, for you, and for our family renders the day tedious and the night unpleasant. The rocks and quick |