ordination from one Elder Dungan, of Rhode Island, Mr. Keach began his life-work in earnest, which evidently bore good fruit, as he now enjoys the reputation of having established the first Baptist church in Philadelphia County, that of Pennepack, from which sprang a large sisterhood of Baptist churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Among later Colonial love-letters are those of Abigail Smith, afterwards Mrs. John Adams, which are marked by the ready wit and playful fancy that characterized all her writings. These qualities she seems to have inherited from no stranger, as her father, the Rev. William Smith of Weymouth, was one of the most facetious of divines. It is said that when his eldest daughter, Mary, married Richard Cranch, he preached from Luke x. 42: “And Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” Abigail also had her turn. Some of the aristocratic parishioners of Weymouth objected to John Adams because he was the son of a small farmer and himself a lawyer, these two facts rendering him, they thought, ineligible to marry the minister’s daughter, in whose veins flowed the bluest of New England blue blood. Mr. Smith accordingly favored his congregation with a discourse on the text, “For John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil,” the latter clause having reference to the groom’s profession, the law, which was not then held in much repute in New England. In a letter written by Miss Smith, from her village home, to John Adams, who was undergoing the process of inoculation for small-pox in Boston, she says,-- “By the time you receive this I hope from experience that you will be able to say that the distemper is but a trifle. Think you I would not endure a trifle for the pleasure of seeing you? Yes, were it ten times that trifle, I would. But my own inclinations must not be followed. I hope you smoke your letters well before you deliver them. Mamma is so fearful lest I catch the distemper, that she hardly ever thinks the letters are sufficiently purified. Did you never rob a bird’s nest? Do you remember how the poor birds would fly round and round, fearful to come nigh, yet not know how to leave the place? Just so they say I hover round Tom whilst he is smoking my letters.” It is to be regretted that John Adams’s answers to these letters are not preserved: they were probably burned up by the anxious mamma. All Abigail’s letters are love-letters in their tone of earnest devotion, whether written before or after marriage. With the details of the stir and excitement of military doings in and around Boston, the arrival of General Washington, the scantiness of provisions, and the cry for pins, which seem to have been as scarce as diamonds, there abound such passages as this: