As she had sat by her father's side, night after night, listening while John Adams spoke with hot enthusiasm of his friend John Hancock, the boy of Braintree, now a rising young citizen of Boston, the resolute advocate of justice for the colonies, who stood unflinchingly against the demands of the mother country, where he thought them unfair,--the conversation had roused her enthusiasm for this unknown hero, until she silently erected an altar within her heart to this ideal of manly virtues. Then John Hancock came to the old mansion to seek the girl who had attracted his attention on that Sabbath Day in June, little dreaming that in those conversations which Dorothy had heard between her father and John Adams she had pieced together a complete biography of her Hero. She knew that in 1737, when the Reverend John Hancock was minister of the First Church in the North Precinct of Braintree (afterward Quincy), he had made the following entry in the parish register of births: JOHN HANCOCK, MY SON, JANUARY 16, 1737. Dorothy also knew that there in the simple parsonage the minister's son grew up, and together with his brother and sister enjoyed the usual life of a child in the country. When he was seven years old his father died, leaving very little money for the support of the widow and three children. Thomas Hancock, his uncle, was at that time the richest merchant in Boston, and had also married a daughter of a prosperous bookseller who was heir to no small fortune herself. The couple being childless, at the death of John Hancock's father they adopted the boy, who was at once taken from the simple parsonage to Thomas Hancock's mansion on Beacon Hill, which must have seemed like a fairy palace to the minister's son, as he "climbed the grand steps and entered the paneled hall with its broad staircase, carved balusters, and a chiming clock surmounted with carved figures, gilt with burnished gold." There were also portraits of dignitaries on the walls of the great drawing-room, which were very impressive in their lace ruffles and velvet costumes of the period, and many articles of furniture of which the country boy did not even know the names. As a matter of course, he was sent to the Boston Public Latin School, and later to Harvard College, from which he graduated on July 17, 1754, when he was seventeen years old--at a time when pretty Dorothy Quincy was a child of seven. From the time of his adoption of his nephew, Thomas Hancock had determined to have him as his successor in the shipping business he had so successfully built up, and so, fresh from college, the young man entered into the business life of Boston, and as the adopted son of a rich and influential merchant, was sought after by mothers with marriageable daughters, and by the daughters themselves, to whose charms he was strangely indifferent.