The good parson was skillful in adapting Scripture to special exigencies, and throughout the Revolution he astonished his hearers by the peculiar fitness of his texts to political uses.  It is related of him that when his eldest daughter married Richard Cranch, he preached to his people from Luke, tenth chapter, forty-second verse:  “And Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her.”  When, a year later, young John Adams came courting the brilliant Abigail, the parish, which assumed a right to be heard on the question of the destiny of the minister’s daughter, grimly objected.  He was upright, singularly abstemious, studious; but he was poor, he was the son of a small farmer, and she was of the gentry.  He was hot-headed and somewhat tactless, and offended his critics.  Worst of all, he was a lawyer, and the prejudice of colonial society reckoned a lawyer hardly honest.  He won this most important of his cases, however, and Parson Smith’s marriage sermon for the bride of nineteen was preached from the text, “For John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say, He hath a devil.”

For ten years Mrs. Adams seems to have lived a most happy life, either in Boston or Braintree, her greatest grief being the frequent absences of her husband on circuit.  His letters to her are many and delightful, expressing again and again, in the somewhat formal phrases of the period, his affection and admiration.  She wrote seldom, her household duties and the care of the children, of whom there were four in ten years, occupying her busy hands.

Meanwhile, the clouds were growing black in the political sky.  Mr. Adams wrote arguments and appeals in the news journals over Latin signatures, papers of instructions to Representatives to the General Court, and legal portions of the controversy between the delegates and Governor Hutchinson.  In all this work Mrs. Adams constantly sympathized and advised.  In August, 1774, he went to Philadelphia as a delegate to a general council of the colonies called to concert measures for united action.  And now begins the famous correspondence, which goes on for a period of nine years, which was intended to be seen only by the eyes of her husband, which she begs him, again and again, to destroy as not worth the keeping, yet which has given her a name and place among the world’s most charming letter-writers.

Her courage, her cheerfulness, her patriotism, her patience never fail her.  Braintree, where, with her little brood, she is to stay, is close to the British lines.  Raids and foraging expeditions are imminent.  Hopes of a peaceful settlement grow dim.  “What course you can or will take,” she writes her husband, “is all wrapped in the bosom of futurity.  Uncertainty and expectation leave the mind great scope.  Did ever any kingdom or State regain its liberty, when once it was invaded, without bloodshed?  I cannot think of it without horror.  Yet we are told that all the misfortunes