The gentleman who led this gorgeous costume and its wearer through "Sir Roger de Coverley" was doubtless dressed in more sober fashion. One of these republican exquisites thus describes his own costume, possibly at the same ball: "I was dressed in a light French blue coat, with a high collar, broad lappels, and large gilt buttons, a double-breasted Marseilles vest, Nankeen-colored cassimere breeches, with white silk stockings, shining pumps, and full ruffles on my breast and at my wrists, together with a ponderous white cravat, with a pudding in it, as we then called it; and I was considered the best dressed gentleman in the room." The winter of 1790-91 was one of extremes. The Adamses burned forty cords of wood in four months. On the 17th and 18th of March, Mrs. Adams dined with all the windows open, put out the fires, and "ate ice to cool her; the glasses at 80." On the 20th, it snowed all day, the snow followed by a keen northwester and frost. In bad weather it was difficult for the dwellers at Bush Hill to stir from their abode. "We are only two miles from town, yet have I been more of a prisoner this winter than I ever was in my life. The road from hence to the pavement is one mile and a half, the soil a brick clay, so that, when there has been heavy rain, or a thaw, you must wallow to the city through a bed of mortar without a bottom, the horses sinking to their knees. If it becomes cold, then the holes and the roughness are intolerable." The next published letter of Mrs. Adams is dated Quincy, 11 February, 1793. It is to Mrs. Smith, and is largely concerned with political issues which today have lost their poignancy. She has much to say of the "artifices and lies of the Jacobins," meaning the anti-Federalist party, which was opposed to Washington and Adams. It is strange indeed to read today that "the President has been openly abused in the _National Gazette_,--abused for his levees as an ape of royalty; Mrs. Washington abused for her drawing-rooms; their celebration of birth-days sneered at; himself insulted because he has not come forward and exerted his influence in favor of a further compensation to the army. They even tell him that a greater misfortune cannot befall a people than for their President to have no competitor; that it infuses into him a supercilious spirit, renders him self-important, and creates an idea that one man only is competent to govern. They compare him to a hyena and a crocodile; charge him with duplicity and deception. The President has not been accustomed to such language, and his feelings will be wounded, I presume." I presume they were. Nobody likes to be called a hyena and a crocodile, and _Pater Patriae_ could not fail to be sensible of a lack of propriety in the epithets.