It is as the wife of Washington, through sentiments called out by the greatness of his character and the love which she bore him, that the moral capacity of Martha Washington’s nature ever approaches greatness. In her reply to Congress, who asked that the body of George Washington might be placed beneath a monument in the capitol which his patriotism had done so much to rear, her words rise to the patriotic grandeur of Abigail Adams, they could not rise higher. She says: “Taught by that great example, which I have so long had before me, never to oppose my private wishes to the public will, I must consent to the request made by Congress, which you have had the goodness to transmit to me, and in doing this, I need not, I cannot say what a sacrifice of individual feeling I make to a sense of public duty.” But it is in the little room at Mount Vernon, in which she died, that Martha Washington, as a woman, comes nearest to us. Here one can realize how utterly done with earth, its pangs and glory, was the soul who shut herself within its narrow walls, there to take on immortality. The rooms of Washington below, a thrifty mechanic of the present day would think too small and shabby for him. Here he died. And when the great soul went forth to the unknown, as a human presence to inhabit it never more, the wife also went forth, and never again crossed its threshold. Here, in this little room, scarcely more than a closet, surrounded only by the simplest necessaries of existence, Martha Washington lived out the lonely days of her desolate widowhood—and here she died. * * * * * Abigail Adams was the first wife of a President who ever presided at the White House—the President’s house, as it was so fitly called in those days. Only in this latter time of degenerate English has it swelled into the “Executive Mansion.” In February, 1797, John Adams was elected President of the United States, to succeed President Washington. From her country home in Massachusetts, Mrs. Adams sent to her husband the following recognition of his exaltation to be chief ruler of the United States: