She manages, with astonishing skill, to keep the household in comfort.  She goes through trials of sickness, death, agonizing suspense, and ever with the same heroic cheerfulness, that her anxious husband may be spared the pangs which she endures.  When he is sent to France and Holland, she accepts the new parting as another service pledged to her country.  She sees her darling boy of ten go with his father, aware that at the best she must bear months of silence, knowing that they may perish at sea or fall into the hands of privateers; but she writes with indomitable cheer, sending the lad tender letters of good advice, a little didactic to modern taste, but throbbing with affection.  “Dear as you are to me,” says this tender mother, “I would much rather you should have found your grave in the ocean you have crossed than see you an immoral, profligate, or graceless child.”

It was the lot of this country parson’s daughter to spend three years in London as wife of the first American minister, to see her husband Vice-President of the United States for eight years and President for four, and to greet her son as the eminent Monroe’s valued Secretary of State, though she died, “seventy-four years young,” before he became President.  She could not, in any station, be more truly a lady than when she made soap and chopped kindling on her Braintree farm.  At Braintree she was no more simply modest than at the Court of St. James or in the Executive Mansion.  Her letters exactly reflect her ardent, sincere, energetic nature.  She shows a charming delight when her husband tells her that his affairs could not possibly be better managed than she manages them, and that she shines not less as a statesman than as a farmeress.  And though she was greatly admired and complimented, no praise so pleased her as his declaration that for all the ingratitude, calumnies, and misunderstandings that he had endured,—­and they were numberless,—­her perfect comprehension of him had been his sufficient compensation.

Lucia Gilbert Runkle

TO HER HUSBAND

BRAINTREE, May 24th, 1775.

My Dearest Friend: 

Our house has been, upon this alarm, in the same scene of confusion that it was upon the former.  Soldiers coming in for a lodging, for breakfast, for supper, for drink, etc.  Sometimes refugees from Boston, tired and fatigued, seek an asylum for a day, a night, a week.  You can hardly imagine how we live; yet—­

     “To the houseless child of want,
       Our doors are open still;
     And though our portions are but scant,
       We give them with good will.”

My best wishes attend you, both for your health and happiness, and that you may be directed into the wisest and best measures for our safety and the security of our posterity.  I wish you were nearer to us:  we know not what a day will bring forth, nor what distress one hour may throw us into.  Hitherto I have been able to maintain a calmness and presence of mind, and hope I shall, let the exigency of the time be what it will.  Adieu, breakfast calls.