“The house is made habitable, but there is not a single apartment finished, and all within side, except the plastering, has been done since B. came.... If the twelve years in which this place has been considered as the future seat of government, had been improved as they would have been in New England, very many of the present inconveniences would have been removed. It is a beautiful spot, capable of any improvement, and the more I view it the more I am delighted with it. * * * * * “The ladies are impatient for a drawing-room: I have no looking-glasses but dwarfs, for this house; and a twentieth part lamps enough to light it. My tea-china is more than half missing.... You can scarcely believe that here in this wilderness city I should find my time so occupied as it is. My visitors, some of them, came three or four miles. The return of one of them is the work of one day.... We have not the _least fence, yard, or other conveniences without_, and the great unfinished audience-room—(the East room) I make a drying-room of to hang my clothes in. Six chambers are made comfortable; two lower rooms, one for a common parlor and one for a ball-room.” Abigail Adams is an illustrious example of the grandeur of human character. She proved in herself how potent an individual may be, and that individual a woman, in spite of caste, of sex, or the restrictions of human law or condition. She never went to school in her life, yet her thoughtful utterances will live where the labored utterances of her scholarly husband are forgotten. She was less than a year the mistress of the President’s house, yet she has lived ever since in memory a grand model to all who succeed her. The daughter of a country clergyman, the wife of a patriotic and ambitious man, whether she gathered her children about her or sent them forth across stormy seas, while she left herself desolate; whether she stood the wife of the Republican Minister before the haughty Charlotte in the stateliest and proudest court of Europe; whether she presided in the President’s house in the new Capital or in the wilderness, or wrote to statesmen and grandchildren in her own lowly house in Quincy, in prosperity or sorrow, in youth and in age, in life and in death, always she was the regnant woman, devout, wise, patriotic, proud, humble and loving.