In the month of November, 1777, Mr. Adams again visited his home, and never afterwards rejoined Congress; for that body in his absence had elected him to perform a duty in a distant land. This was destined to furnish a severe trial to the fortitude of Mrs. Adams. On the 25th of October, she had written a letter to him, it being the anniversary of their wedding-day, in which she notices the fact that "out of thirteen years of their married life, three had been passed in a state of separation." Yet in these years the distance between them had never been very great, and the means of communication almost always reasonably speedy and certain. She appears little to have anticipated that in a few short weeks she was to be deprived of even these compensations, and to send her husband to a foreign country, over seas covered with the enemy's ships. "I very well remember," she says, in an earlier letter, "when the eastern circuits of the courts, which lasted a month, were thought an age, and an absence of three months, intolerable; but we are carried from step to step, and from one degree to another, to endure that which first we think insupportable." It was in exact accordance with this process, that the separations of half a year or more were to be followed by those which lasted many years, and the distance from Boston to Philadelphia or Baltimore was extended to Paris and a different quarter of the globe. Upon the reception of the news of his appointment as Joint Commissioner at the Court of France, in the place of Silas Deane, Mr. Adams lost no time in making his arrangements for the voyage. But it was impossible for him to think of risking his wife and children all at once with him in so perilous an enterprise. The frigate _Boston_, a small and not very good vessel, mounting twenty-eight guns, had been ordered to transport him to his destination. The British fleet, stationed at Newport, perfectly well knew the circumstances under which she was going, and was on the watch to favor the new Commissioner with a fate similar to that afterwards experienced by Mr. Laurens. The political attitude of France still remained equivocal. Hence, on every account it seemed advisable that Mr. Adams should go upon his mission alone. He left the shores of his native town to embark in the frigate in February, 1778, accompanied only by his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, then a boy not quite eleven years of age.