obtained, through the
generosity of friends or her own ingenious labors, indispensable clothes
for the family. Frugality, that much lauded virtue in the eighteenth
century, needed not to be preached in the old Purchase Street home;
but life went on there, somehow or other, decently enough, not without
geniality yet with evident piety. The old Bible is still preserved from
which each evening some member of the family read a chapter, and at
every meal the head of the house said grace, returning thanks for God's
benefits.

If Samuel Adams at the age of forty-two was known for a man who could
not successfully manage his own affairs, he was also known, and very
well known, for a man with a singular talent for managing the affairs of
the community; he could manage successfully, for example, town meetings
and every sort of business, great or small, incidental to local
politics. This talent he may have inherited from his father, who was
himself a notable of the neighborhood,--one of the organizers of the
"New South" church, and prominent about 1724 in a club popularly known
as the "Caulkers' Club," formed for the purpose of laying "plans for
introducing certain persons into places of trust and power," and was
himself from time to time introduced into such places of trust and power
as justice of the peace, deacon, selectman, and member of the provincial
assembly. From an early age, the younger Samuel exhibited a marked
aptitude for this sort of activity, and was less likely to be found
"in his countinghouse a-counting of his money" than in some hospitable
tavern or back shop discussing town topics with local worthies. Samuel
Adams was born to serve on committees. He had the innate slant of
mind that properly belongs to a moderator of mass meetings called to
aggravate a crisis. With the soul of a Jacobin, he was most at home in
clubs, secret clubs of which everyone had heard and few were members,
designed at best to accomplish some particular good for the people, at
all events meeting regularly to sniff the approach of tyranny in the
abstract, academically safeguarding the commonwealth by discussing the
first principles of government.

From the days of Anne Hutchinson, Boston never lacked clubs; and
the Caulkers' Club was the prototype of many, rather more secular and
political than religious or transcendental, which flourished in the
years preceding the Revolution. John Adams, in that Diary which tells us
so much that we wish