'Mark his majestic fabric! he's a temple
Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine;
His soul's the deity that lodges there;
Nor is the pile unworthy of the god.'

General Lee looks like a careless, hardy veteran, and, by his
appearance, brought to my mind his namesake, Charles XII. of Sweden.
The elegance of his pen far exceeds that of his person."

The horrors of war were now aggravated by those of pestilence. From
the British army in Boston, the dysentery had spread into the
surrounding country. Mrs. Adams and her whole family were attacked.
"Our house," she writes to her husband, September 8, 1775, "is a
hospital in every part, and, what with my own weakness and distress of
mind for my family, I have been unhappy enough. And such is the
distress of the neighborhood, that I can scarcely find a well person
to assist me in looking after the sick." Again on the 25th she writes,
"I sit with a heavy heart to write to you. Woe follows woe, and one
affliction treads upon the heels of another. My distress in my own
family having in some measure abated, it is excited anew upon that of
my dear mother. She has taken the disorder, and lies so bad, that we
have little hope of her recovery." On the 29th, "It is allotted me to
go from the sick and almost dying bed of one of the best of parents,
to my own habitation, where again I behold the same scene, only varied
by a remoter connection--

'A bitter change, severer for severe.'

You can more easily conceive than I can describe what are the
sensations of my heart when absent from either, continually expecting
a messenger with the fatal tidings." "The desolation of war is not so
distressing as the havoc made by pestilence. Some poor parents are
mourning the loss of three, four, and five children; and some families
are wholly stripped of every member."

But the hand of the pestilence was stayed, and her country again
engrosses her thoughts. She very early declares herself for
independence, and wonders how any honest heart can hesitate at
adopting the same sentiment. An attempt to drive the enemy from Boston
is meditated, and she tells us that she has been kept in a state of
anxiety and expectation. "It has been said 'to-morrow' and 'to-morrow'
for this month; but when this dreadful to-morrow will be, I know not.
But hark! The house this instant shakes with the roar of cannon. I
have been to the door, and find it a cannonade from our army." The
militia are all orde