“My thoughts and my meditations are with you, though personally absent; and my petitions to Heaven are that the things which make for peace may not be hidden from your eyes.  My feelings are not those of pride or ostentation upon the occasion.

“They are solemnized by a sense of the obligations, the important trusts, and numerous duties connected with it.  That you may be enabled to discharge them with honor to yourself, with justice and impartiality to your country, and with satisfaction to this great people, shall be the daily prayer of your

    “A.A.”

It was in this room that Abigail waited while British soldiers ransacked the rooms below and made bullets of the best pewter spoons.  Here her son who was to be President was born.

John Quincy Adams was six years old when his father kissed him good-by and rode away for Philadelphia with John Hancock and Samuel Adams (who rode a horse loaned him by John Adams).  Abigail stood in the doorway holding the baby, and watched them disappear in the curve of the road.  This was in August, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-four.  Most of the rest of that year Abigail was alone with her babies on the little farm.  It was the same next year, and in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, too, when John Adams wrote home that he had made the formal move for Independency and also nominated George Washington as Commander-in-Chief of the army; and he hoped things would soon be better.

Those were troublous times in which to live in the vicinity of Boston.  There were straggling troops passing up and down the Plymouth road every day.  Sometimes they were redcoats and sometimes buff and blue, but all seemed to be very hungry and extremely thirsty, and the Adams household received a great deal more attention than it courted.  The master of the house was away, but all seemed to know who lived there, and the callers were not always courteous.

In such a feverish atmosphere of unrest, children evolve quickly into men and women, and their faces take on the look of thought where should be only careless, happy, dimpled smiles.  Yes, responsibility matures, and that is the way John Quincy Adams got cheated out of his childhood.

When eight years of age, his mother called him the little man of the house.  The next year he was a post-rider, making a daily trip to Boston with letter-bags across his saddlebows.

When eleven years of age, his father came home to say that some one had to go to France to serve with Jay and Franklin in making a treaty.

“Go,” said Abigail, “and God be with you!” But when it was suggested that John Quincy go, too, the parting did not seem so easy.  But it was a fine opportunity for the boy to see the world of men, and the mother’s head appreciated it even if her heart did not.  And yet she had the heroism that is willing to remain behind.

So father and son sailed away; and little John Quincy added postscripts to his father’s letters and said, “I send my loving duty to my mamma.”