ss
applicable to him who is invested with the Chief Magistracy of a
nation, though he wear not a crown, nor the robes of royalty.

"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, ma