Now and then Mrs. Adams took her chaise and went into town to make some visits in Boston or Cambridge. "Present my compliments to Mr. Dana," she writes. "Tell him I have called upon his lady, and we enjoyed an afternoon of sweet communion. I find she would not be averse to taking a voyage, should he be continued abroad. She groans most bitterly, and is irreconcilable to his absence. I am a mere philosopher to her. I am _inured_, but not hardened, to the painful portion. Shall I live to see it otherwise?" This was written in July, 1780. We may fancy Madam Abigail setting out on this expedition, stately and demure in hoop petticoat and high-heeled shoes. We cannot be sure whether she wore a Leghorn hat or a calash. Here I pause for a moment; I remember a calash, in my childhood. It was made of thin green silk, shirred on pieces of rattan or whalebone, placed two or three inches apart. These were drawn together at the back by a cape, and thus, bent into hoop-shape, could be drawn so far over the face as to cover it entirely. The "bashful bonnet," the thing was called; certainly, no headdress ever was uglier, but it must have been "matchless for the complexion," as Madam Patti says of a certain well-known soap. On the whole, knowing what the calash looked like, I should prefer to think that Madam Abigail wore a Leghorn hat over her fine dark hair. Leghorns were costly. I have heard of their costing twenty-five or even fifty dollars: but they lasted for years and years. It was not till some years after this that American women began to make their own bonnet straw. It became the rage, both here and in England, and women vied with each other in the amount and quality of their "straw-work." Hats and bonnets were not enough; women wore "straw-coats" or _paillasses_; these were made of "sarcenet, calico, or linen, and ornamented profusely with straw." A writer in the _European Magazine_ exclaims: "Straw! straw! everything is ornamented in straw, from the cap to the shoe-buckles; Ceres is the favorite, not only of the female but the male part of the fashionable world, for the gentlemen's waistcoats are ribbed with straw." Here is a long digression; let us hope that Mrs. Dana gave Mrs. Adams a good dish of tea and that she went home refreshed. There are but few letters of 1780: probably many were lost. In October Mrs. Adams again quotes the current prices, for which her husband frequently asks.