ms, led to strict non-intercourse for the
next thirteen years. The only acknowledgment which Adams carried with
him, in this unwelcome and mortifying retirement for his twenty-five
years' services was the privilege, which had been granted to Washington
on his withdrawal from the presidency, and after his death to his widow,
and bestowed likewise upon all subsequent ex-presidents and their
widows, of receiving his letters free of postage for the remainder of
his life.

Fortunately for Adams, his thrifty habits and love of independence,
sustained during his absence from home by the economical and managing
talents of his wife, had enabled him to add to what he had saved from
his profession before entering public life, savings from his salaries,
enough to make up a sufficient property to support him for the remainder
of his life, in conformity with his ideas of a decent style of propriety
and solid comfort. Almost all his savings he had invested in the farming
lands about him. In his vocabulary, property meant land. With all the
rapid wealth then being made through trade and navigation, he had no
confidence in the permanency of any property but land, views in which he
was confirmed by the commercial revulsions of which he lived to be a
witness.

Adams was the possessor, partly by inheritance and partly by purchase,
of his father's farm, including the house in which he himself was born.
He had, however, transferred his own residence to a larger and
handsomer dwelling near by, which had been forfeited by one of the
refugee tories of the revolution and purchased by him, where he spent
the next quarter of a century.

In this comfortable home, acquired by himself, he sought consolation for
his troubled spirit in the cultivation of his lands, in books and in the
bosom of his family. Mrs. Adams, to her capacities as a house-keeper,
steward and farm manager, added a brightness and activity of mind and a
range of reading, such as fully qualified her to sympathize with her
husband in his public as well as his private career. She shared his
tastes for books, and as his letters to her are unsurpassed by any
American letters ever yet published, so hers to him, as well as to
others, from which a selection has also been published, show her, though
exhibiting less of nature and more of formality than he, yet worthy of
admiration and respect as well as of the tenderness with which he always
regarded her.

To affections strong enough to