Stealthily the years go by, and we wist not they are passing, yet the muffled and hoarse voice of a century astounds us with its parting. The centennial birthdays have been celebrated; we have passed the hundredth anniversary of victories won and independence achieved. If the glad, free spirits of the Chief and his companion are permitted to review their earthly pilgrimage, let it be a source of gratification to us to know they smile upon a Republic of peace. Their bodies we guard, while they crumbled away in the bosom of their birth-place, and as long as a son of America remains a freeman, it will be a well-spring of inspiration to feel that Virginia contains the _Pater Patriæ_ and the woman immortalized by his love. [Illustration: Painted by G. Stuart Engraved by G. F. Storm. A Adams] II. ABIGAIL ADAMS. Abigail Smith, the daughter of a New England Congregationalist minister, was born at Weymouth, in 1744. Her father was the settled pastor of that place for more than forty years, and her grandfather was also a minister of the same denomination in a neighboring town. The younger years of her life were passed in the quiet seclusion of her grandfather’s house; and under the instructions of her grandmother, she imbibed most of the lessons which were the most deeply impressed upon her mind. “I have not forgotten,” she says in a letter to her own daughter, in the year 1795, “the excellent lessons which I received from my grandmother at a very early period of life; I frequently think they made a more durable impression upon my mind than those which I received from my own parents. This tribute is due to the memory of those virtues, the sweet remembrance of which will flourish, though she has long slept with her ancestors.”