There is a clothespress in the corner, into which Mr. Spear says we may look.  On the door is a slippery-elm button, and within, hanging on wooden pegs, are dainty dresses; stiff, curiously embroidered gowns they are, that came from across the sea, sent, perhaps, by John Adams when he went to France, and left Abigail here to farm and sew and weave and teach the children.  June examined the dresses carefully, and said the embroidery was handmade, and must have taken months and months to complete.  On a high shelf of the closet are bandboxes, in which are bonnets, astonishing bonnets, with prodigious flaring fronts.  Mr. Spear insisted that June should try one on, and when she did we stood off and declared the effect was a vision of loveliness.  Outside the clothespress, on a peg, hangs a linsey-woolsey every-day gown that shows marks of wear.  The waist came just under June’s arms, and the bottom of the dress to her shoe-tops.

We asked Mr. Spear the price of it, but the custodian is not commercial.  In a corner of the room is a cedar chest containing hand-woven linen.

By the front window is a little, low desk, with a leaf that opens out for a writing-shelf.  And here you see quill-pens, fresh nibbed, and ink in a curious well made from horn.  Here it was that Abigail wrote those letters to her lover-husband when he attended those first and second Congresses in Philadelphia; and then when he was in France and England, those letters in which we see affection, loyalty, tales of babies with colic, brave, political good sense, and all those foolish trifles that go to fill up love-letters, and, at the last, are their divine essence and charm.

Here, she wrote the letter telling of going with their seven-year-old boy, John Quincy, to Penn’s Hill to watch the burning of Charlestown; and saw the flashing of cannons and rising smoke that marked the battle of Bunker Hill.  Here she wrote to her husband when he was minister to England, “This little cottage has more comfort and satisfaction for you than the courts of royalty.”

But of all the letters written by that brave woman none reveals her true nobility better than the one written to her husband the day he became President of the United States.  Here it is entire: 

Quincy, 8 February, 1797

“The sun is dressed in brightest beams,
To give thy honors to the day.”

“And may it prove an auspicious prelude to each ensuing season.  You have this day to declare yourself head of a Nation.  And now, O Lord, my God, Thou hast made Thy servant ruler over the people.  Give unto him an understanding heart, that he may know how to go out and come in before this great people; that he may discern between good and bad.  For who is able to judge this Thy so great a people, were the words of a royal Sovereign; and not less applicable to him who is invested with the Chief Magistracy of a nation, though he wear not a crown, nor the robes of royalty.