Page:The Ladies of the White House.djvu/113

Rh December found Mr. Adams once more at home to cheer his suffering family, but Congress demanded his presence, and after a stay of one month, he returned again to the halls of the nation, March came, and her anxious, solitary life was in nowise brightened. The distance, in those days of slow travel and bad roads, from Boston to Philadelphia was immense, and letters were precious articles hard to receive. In speaking of the anticipated attack on Boston, she says: "It has been said to-morrow and to-morrow; but when the dreadful to-morrow will be I know not," Yet even as she wrote, the first peal of the American guns rang out their dissonance on the chilling night winds, and the house shook and trembled from cellar to garret.It was no time for calm thoughts now, and she left her letter unfinished to qo out and watch the lurid lights that flashed and disappeared in the distance. Next morning she walked to Penn's Hill, where she sat listening to the amazing roar, and watching the British shells as they fell round about the camps of her friends. Her home at the foot of the hill was all her earthly wealth, and the careful husbanding of each year's crop her only income; yet while she ever and anon cast her eye upon it, the thoughts that welled into words were not of selfish repinings, but of proud expressions of high-souled patriotism. "The cannonade is from our army," she continues, "and the sight is one of the grandest in nature, and is of the true species of the sublime. 'Tis now an incessant roar. To-night we