It was fortunate for Mrs. Adams that her husband was a strong, intellectual nature; he both satisfied and sustained her, and rendered her sojourn on earth contented and agreeable. In her father’s house in London he first saw her, in 1794, and on the 26th of July, 1797, they were married at the Church of All-Hallows. Soon afterward his father became President, and he was transferred to Berlin, where he repaired with his wife as a bride, to play her part in the higher circles of social and political life. It need scarcely be added that she proved perfectly competent to this; and that during four years, which comprised the period of her stay at that court, notwithstanding almost continual ill-health, she succeeded in making friends and conciliating a degree of good-will, the recollection of which is, even at this distance of time, believed to be among the most agreeable of the associations with her varied life. In 1801, after the birth of her eldest child, she embarked with Mr. Adams on his return to the United States. Not to Maryland, the home of her childhood, but, a stranger to their habits and manners, she went among the New England people, and settled with her husband in Boston. Here she determined to be satisfied and live with a people whom in feeling she was not unlike, but scarcely was she beginning to feel at home when Mr. Adams was elected Senator, and she removed with him to Washington. A sister was already established there, and she met once more the members of her own family, where to her the winter months passed pleasantly away. Each summer she returned to Boston, and thus alternating between there and Washington in winter, she passed the eight years of Jefferson’s term. To many, the capital was an out of the way place, and not always pleasant to Congressmen’s wives, some of whom left the gayeties of larger cities to be detained six or eight months; but Mrs. Adams was peculiarly fortunate in her position, having around her near and dear relations from whom she had been separated many years. It became home to her, and to a Southerner, the climate was more congenial than the region of her husband’s birth-place. Mr. Adams, called by President Madison, to embark for Russia as its first accredited minister, Mrs. Adams determined to go, even at the cost of leaving her two eldest children with their grandparents, and taking with her a third, not yet two years old. They sailed from Boston early in August, and after a long and somewhat hazardous passage arrived in St. Petersburg toward the close of October.