"It is arrogance and presumption, in human sagacity, to pretend to penetrate far into the designs of Heaven. The most perfect reverence and resignation becomes us, but I cannot help depending upon this, that the present dreadful calamity of that beloved town is intended to bind the colonies together in more indissoluble bonds, and to animate their exertions at this great crisis in the affairs of mankind. It has this effect in a most remarkable degree, as far as I have yet seen or heard. It will plead with all America with more irresistible persuasion than angels trumpet-tongued. "In a cause which interests the whole globe, at a time when my friends and country are in such keen distress, I am scarcely ever interrupted in the least degree by apprehensions for my personal safety. I am often concerned for you and our dear babes, surrounded, as you are, by people who are too timorous and too much susceptible of alarms. Many fears and jealousies and imaginary dangers will be suggested to you, but I hope you will not be impressed by them. In case of real danger, of which you cannot fail to have previous intimations, fly to the woods with our children. Give my tenderest love to them, and to all." "Fly to the woods with our children"! The words tell only too plainly how terrible was the danger the writer apprehended. The woods were--or at any moment might be--full of prowling savages, from whom no mercy could be expected; yet John Adams would choose to run this risk rather than others that threatened, or seemed to threaten, his dear ones. One feels through all the years the thrill of his anxiety. "For the space of twelve months," says John Quincy Adams, "my mother with her infant children dwelt liable every hour of the day and night to be butchered in cold blood or taken into Boston as hostages by any foraging or marauding detachment of men like that actually sent forth on the 19th of April to capture John Hancock and Samuel Adams, on their way to attend the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. My father was separated from his family on his way to attend the same congress, and then my mother and her children lived in unintermitted danger of being consumed with them all in a conflagration kindled by a torch in the same hands which on the 17th of June lighted the fires of Charlestown." Abigail, in Braintree, no longer "calm and happy," laments over the sufferings of her friends and former neighbors. "5 May, 1775.