The Constitution of the State of Massachusetts, adopted in the year 1780, contains an article for the Encouragement of Literature, which, it declares, should be fostered because its influence is “to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in dealings, sincerity and good humor, and all social affections and generous sentiments among the people.”  In these words, as in a mirror, is reflected the Massachusetts of the eighteenth century, where households like the Adamses’, the Warrens’, the Otises’, made the standard of citizenship.  Six years before this remarkable document was framed, Abigail Adams had written to her husband, then engaged in nation-making in Philadelphia:—­“I most sincerely wish that some more liberal plan might be laid and executed for the benefit of the rising generation, and that our new Constitution may be distinguished for encouraging learning and virtue.”  And he, spending his days and nights for his country, sacrificing his profession, giving up the hope of wealth, writes her:—­“I believe my children will think that I might as well have labored a little, night and day, for their benefit.  But I will tell them that I studied and labored to procure a free constitution of government for them to solace themselves under; and if they do not prefer this to ample fortune, to ease and elegance, they are not my children.  They shall live upon thin diet, wear mean clothes, and work hard with cheerful hearts and free spirits, or they may be the children of the earth, or of no one, for me.”

[Illustration:  ABIGAIL ADAMS]

In old Weymouth, one of those quiet Massachusetts towns, half-hidden among the umbrageous hills, where the meeting-house and the school-house rose before the settlers’ cabins were built, where the one elm-shaded main street stretches its breadth between two lines of self-respecting, isolated frame houses, each with its grassy dooryard, its lilac bushes, its fresh-painted offices, its decorous wood-pile laid with architectural balance and symmetry,—­there, in the dignified parsonage, on the 11th of November, 1744, was born to Parson William Smith and Elizabeth his wife, Abigail, the second of three beautiful daughters.  Her mother was a Quincy, of a distinguished line, and her mother was a Norton, of a strain not less honorable.  Nor were the Smiths unimportant.

In that day girls had little instruction.  Abigail says of herself, in one of her letters:—­“I never was sent to any school.  Female education, in the best families, went no further than writing and arithmetic; in some few and rare instances, music and dancing.  It was fashionable to ridicule female learning.”  But the household was bookish.  Her mother knew the “British Poets” and all the literature of Queen Anne’s Augustan age.  Her beloved grandmother Quincy, at Mount Wollaston, seems to have had both learning and wisdom, and to her father she owed the sense of fun, the shrewdness, the clever way of putting things which make her letters so delightful.