So passed the great author of "Waverley" away. And when, in due course, his executors came to search for his testament, and lifted up his desk, "we found," says one of them, "arranged in careful order a series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks." There were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his mother's toilet-table when he, a sickly child, slept in her dressing-room; the silver taper-stand which the young advocate bought for her with his first fee; a row of small packets inscribed by her hand, and containing the hair of such of her children as had died before her; and more odds and ends of a like sort--pathetic tokens of a love which bound together for a little while here on earth, and binds together for evermore in heaven, Christian mother and son. Sir Walter of the land Of song and old romance, Tradition in his cunning hand Obedient as the lance His valiant Black Knight bore, Wove into literature The legend, myth, and homely lore Which now for us endure, To charm our weary hours, To rouse our stagnant hearts, And leave the sense of new-born powers, Which never more departs. We thank him in the name Of One who sits on high, And aye abides in every fame Which makes a brighter sky. * * * * * IV. ABIGAIL ADAMS (BORN 1744--DIED 1818.) THE WIFE OF OUR SECOND PRESIDENT--THE MOTHER OF OUR SIXTH. Abigail Smith, the daughter of a Congregational minister, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was one of the most noted women of our early history. She left a record of her heart and character, and to some extent a picture of the stirring times in which she lived, in the shape of letters which are of perennial value, especially to the young. "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 in explanation, "I was always sick." When girls, however, were sent to school, their education seldom went beyond writing and arithmetic. But in spite of disadvantages, she read and studied in private, and by means of correspondence with relatives and others, cultivated her mind, and formed an easy and graceful style of writing. On the 25th of October, 1764, Miss Smith became the wife of John Adams, a lawyer of Braintree, the part of the town in which he lived being afterwards called Quincy, in honor of Mrs. Adams's maternal grandfather. Charles Francis Adams, her grandson, from whose memoir of her the material for this brief sketch is drawn, says that the ten years immediately following her marriage present little that is worth recording.