Noble Deeds of American Women Author:John Clement Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE WIFE OF JOHN" ADAMS. The mother in her office holds the key Of the soul; and she it is who stamps the coin Of character, and makes the being who wou... more »ld be a savage, But for her gentle cares, a Christian man. Old Play - 0 we will walk this world, Yoked in all exercise of noble aim. Tennyson. Abigail Smith was a daughter of the Rev. William Smith, a Congregational minister of Weymouth, Massachusetts, where she was born on the eleventh of November, 1744, O. S. " It was fashionable to ridicule female learning," in her day; and she says of herself in one of her letters, " I was never sent to any school." She adds, " I was always sick. Female education, in the best families, went no further than writing and arithmetic." But notwithstanding her educational disadvantages, she read and studied in private, and kept up a brisk correspondence with relatives, and by these means expanded and fed her mind, and culti vated an easy and graceful style of writing. On the twenty-fifth of October, 1764, Miss Smith became the wife of John Adams, a lawyer of Braintree.Her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, to whose Memoir of her we are indebted for these statistics, says, that " the ten years immediately following, present little that is worth recording." The part of the town in which he lived was afterwards called Quincv in honor of Mrs. Adams's maternal grandfather. Prior to 1778, Mr. and Mrs. Adams had been separated at sundry times, in all, more than three years, which was a severe trial to her fortitude. The strength of her conjugal affection may be gathered from an extract from one of her letters: " I very well remember," ehe writes, " when the eastern circuits of the courts, which lasted a month, were thought an age, and an absence of three months, intolerable...« less