Elizabeth his wife, Abigail, the second of three beautiful daughters.
Her mother was a Quincy, of a distinguished line, and _her_ mother was a
Norton, of a strain not less honorable. Nor were the Smiths unimportant.

In that day girls had little instruction. Abigail says of herself, in
one of her letters:--"I never was sent to any school. Female education,
in the best families, went no further than writing and arithmetic; in
some few and rare instances, music and dancing. It was fashionable to
ridicule female learning." But the household was bookish. Her mother
knew the "British Poets" and all the literature of Queen Anne's Augustan
age. Her beloved grandmother Quincy, at Mount Wollaston, seems to have
had both learning and wisdom, and to her father she owed the sense of
fun, the shrewdness, the clever way of putting things which make her
letters so delightful.

The good parson was skillful in adapting Scripture to special
exigencies, and throughout the Revolution he astonished his hearers by
the peculiar fitness of his texts to political uses. It is related of
him that when his eldest daughter married Richard Cranch, he preached to
his people from Luke, tenth chapter, forty-second verse: "And Mary hath
chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her." When, a
year later, young John Adams came courting the brilliant Abigail, the
parish, which assumed a right to be heard on the question of the destiny
of the minister's daughter, grimly objected. He was upright, singularly
abstemious, studious; but he was poor, he was the son of a small farmer,
and she was of the gentry. He was hot-headed and somewhat tactless, and
offended his critics. Worst of all, he was a lawyer, and the prejudice
of colonial society reckoned a lawyer hardly honest. He won this most
important of his cases, however, and Parson Smith's marriage sermon for
the bride of nineteen was preached from the text, "For John came neither
eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say, He hath a devil."

For ten years Mrs. Adams seems to have lived a most happy life, either
in Boston or Braintree, her greatest grief being the frequent absences
of her husband on circuit. His letters to her are many and delightful,
expressing again and again, in the somewhat formal phrases of the
period, his affection and admiration. She wrote seldom, her household
duties and the care of the children, of whom there were four in ten
years, occupying her busy hands.

Mean