her letters, "I was never sent to any school." She adds in explanation,
"I was always sick." When girls, however, were sent to school, their
education seldom went beyond writing and arithmetic. But in spite of
disadvantages, she read and studied in private, and by means of
correspondence with relatives and others, cultivated her mind, and
formed an easy and graceful style of writing.

On the 25th of October, 1764, Miss Smith became the wife of John Adams,
a lawyer of Braintree, the part of the town in which he lived being
afterwards called Quincy, in honor of Mrs. Adams's maternal grandfather.
Charles Francis Adams, her grandson, from whose memoir of her the
material for this brief sketch is drawn, says that the ten years
immediately following her marriage present little that is worth
recording.

But when the days of the Revolution came on, those times that tried
men's souls, women were by no means exempt from tribulation, and they,
too, began to make history. The strength of Mrs. Adams's affection for
her husband may be learned from an extract from one of her letters: "I
very well remember when Eastern circuits of the courts, which lasted a
month, were thought an age, and an absence of three months intolerable;
but we are carried from step to step, and from one degree to another, to
endure that which we at first think impossible."

In 1778 her husband went as one of the commissioners to France. During
his absence Mrs. Adams managed, as she had often done before, both the
household and the farm--a true wife and mother of the Revolution. "She
was a farmer cultivating the land, and discussing the weather and the
crops; a merchant reporting prices current and the rates of exchange,
and directing the making up of invoices; a politician speculating upon