The parents of John Adams were industrious and savin’—­the little farm prospered, for Boston supplied a goodly market, and weekly trips were made there in a one-horse cart, often piloted by young John, with the minister’s boy for ballast.  The Adams family had ambitions for their son John—­he was to go to Harvard and be educated, and be a minister and preach at Braintree, or Weymouth, or perhaps even Boston!

In the meantime the Reverend John Hancock had died, and the widowed mother was not able to give her boy a college education—­times were hard.

But the lad’s uncle, Thomas Hancock, a prosperous merchant of Boston, took quite an interest in young John.  And it occurred to him to adopt the fatherless boy, legally, as his own.  The mother demurred, but after some months decided that it was best so, for when twenty-one he would be her boy just as much and as truly as if his uncle had not adopted him.  And so the rich uncle took him, and rigged him out with a deal finer clothing than he had ever before worn, and sent him to the Latin School and afterward over to Cambridge, with silver jingling in his pocket.

Prosperity is a severe handicap to youth; not very many grown men can stand it; but beyond a needless display of velvet coats and frilled shirts, the young man stood the test, and got through Harvard.  In point of scholarship he did not stand so high as John Adams; and between the lads there grew a small but well-defined gulf, as is but natural between homespun and broadcloth.  Still the gulf was not impassable, for over it friendly favors were occasionally passed.

John Hancock’s mother wanted him to be a preacher, but Uncle Thomas would not listen to it—­the youth must be taught to be a merchant, so he could be the ready helper and then the successor of his foster-father.

Graduating at the early age of seventeen, John Hancock at once went to work in his uncle’s counting-house in Boston.  He was a fine, tall fellow with dash and spirit, and seemed to show considerable aptitude for the work.  The business prospered, and Uncle Thomas was very proud of his handsome ward, who was quite in demand at parties and balls and in a general social way, while the uncle could not dance a minuet to save him.

Not needing the young man very badly around the store, the uncle sent him to Europe to complete his education by travel.  He went with the retiring Governor Pownal, whose taste for social enjoyment was very much in accord with his own.  In England, he attended the funeral of George the Second, and saw the coronation of George the Third, little thinking the while that he would some day make violent efforts to snatch from that crown its brightest jewel.

When young Hancock was twenty-seven, the uncle died, and left to him his entire fortune of three hundred fifty thousand dollars.  It made him one of the very richest men in the Colony—­for at that time there was not a man in Massachusetts worth half a million dollars.