cepted letters have reached Philadelphia, and what effect they have there. There is a most infamous versification of them, I hear, sent out. I have not been able to get it.

As to politics, there seems to be a dead calm upon all sides. Some of the Tories have been sending out their children. Colonel Chandler has sent out his, and Mr. Winslow has sent out his daughter. People appear to be gratified with the Remonstrance, Address, and Petition, and most earnestly long for further intelligence.

God helps them that help themselves, as King Richard says; and if we can obtain the Divine aid by our own virtue, fortitude, and perseverance, we may be sure of relief.

Tomorrow will be three weeks since you left home; in all which time I have not heard one word from you. Patience is a lesson I have not to learn, so I can wait your own time, but hope it will not be long ere my anxious heart is relieved. Adieu! I need not say how sincerely I am

Your affectionate

PORTIA.

8 March, 1778.

'Tis a little more than three weeks since the dearest of friends and tenderest of husbands left his solitary partner, and quitted all the fond endearments of domestic felicity for the dangers of the sea, exposed, perhaps, to the attack of a hostile foe, and, O good Heaven! can I add, to the dark assassin, to the secret murderer, and the bloody emissary of as cruel a tyrant as God, in His righteous judgments, ever suffered to disgrace the throne of Britain.

I have traveled with you over the wide Atlantic, and could have landed you safe, with humble confidence, at your desired haven, and then have set myself down to enjoy a negative kind of happiness in the painful part which it has pleased Heaven to allot me; but the intelligence with regard to that great philosopher, able statesman, and unshaken friend of his country,3 has planted a dagger in my breast, and I feel, with double edge, the weapon that pierced the bosom of a Franklin.

"For nought avail the virtues of the heart,
Nor towering genius claims its due reward;
From Britain's fury, as from death's keen dart,
No worth can save us, and no fame can guard."

The more distinguished the person, the greater the inveteracy

3 A rumor was at this time current that Franklin had been assassinated in Paris.

of these foes of human nature. The argument of my friends to alleviate my anxiety, by persuading me that this shocking attempt will put you more upon your guard and render your person more secure than if it had never taken place, is kind in them, and has some weight; but my greatest comfort and consolation arise from the belief of a superintending Providence, to whom I can with confidence commit you, since not a sparrow falls to the ground without His notice. Were it not for this, I should be miserable and overwhelmed by my fears and apprehensions.

Freedom of sentiment, the life and soul of friendship, is in a great measure cut off by the danger of miscarriage and the apprehension of letters falling into the hands of our enemies. Should this meet with that fate, may they blush for their connection with a nation who have rendered themselves infamous and abhorred by a long list of crimes, which not their high achievements, nor the lustre of former deeds, nor the tender appellation of parent, nor the fond connection which once subsisted, can ever blot from our remembrance, nor wipe out those indellible stains of their cruelty and baseness. They have engraven them with a pen of iron on a rock forever.

To my dear son remember me in the most affectionate terms. I would have written to him, but my notice is so short that I have not time. Enjoin it upon him never to disgrace his mother, and to behave worthily of his father. Tender as maternal affection is, it was swallowed up in what I found a stronger, or so intermixed that I felt it not in its full force till after he had left me. I console myself with the hopes of his reaping advantages, under the careful eye of a tender parent, which it was not in my power to bestow upon him.

There has nothing material taken place in the political world since you left us. This letter will go by a vessel for Bilbao, from whence you may perhaps get better opportunities of conveyance than from any other place. The letter you delivered to the pilot came safe to hand. All the little folks are anxious for the safety of their papa and brother, to whom they desire to be remembered; to which are added the tenderest sentiments of affection, and the fervent prayers for your happiness and safety, of your PORTIA.

con

Mrs. Ellet's work upon "The Women of the American Revolution" tains interesting sketches of the mother and the wife of Washington, of Abigail Adams, Mercy Warren, Esther Reed, Catharine Greene, Lydia Darrah, and many more of the heroic women of the period. A little book which is to be especially commended to the young people is Edward Abbott's

"Revolutionary Times," consisting of bright and simple sketches of the country, its people, and their ways, at the time of the Revolution, and containing at the end a good list of books which tell more about these things. Mr. Abbott's chapters on "Domestic Concerns" and "The Men and Women of the Revolution are of particular interest in the present connection.

There is nothing which gives a better picture of social and domestic life during the Revolution than the "Familiar Letters of John Adams and his Wife." Abigail Adams was one of the noblest women of America. Her father was the Rev. William Smith of Weymouth; her mother, Elizabeth Quincy, was a descendant of John Norton and Thomas Shepard, the famous old Puritan ministers. She was married to John Adams in 1764, when she was twenty years old, and when the troubles with England were just beginning. Her letters to her husband during the Revolution, a few of which are given in this leaflet, are important not only for their pictures of home life and their information on public affairs, but for their revelations of her own strong and beautiful character. "They are remarkable," says her biographer, "because they display the readiness with which she could devote herself to the most opposite duties, and the cheerful manner in which she could accommodate herself to the difficulties of the times. She is a farmer cultivating the land, and discussing the weather and the crops; a merchant reporting prices-current and the rates of exchange, and directing the making up of invoices; a politician speculating upon the probabilities of peace or war; and a mother writing the most exalted sentiments to her son. All of these pursuits she adopts together, some from choice, the rest from the necessity of the case; and in all she appears equally well.”

Old South Leaflets.

Under the Old Elm.

From the poem read at Cambridge on the Hundredth Anniversary of Washington's taking Command of the American Army, 3d July, 1775.

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. '

I.

I.

WORDS pass as wind, but where great deeds were done
A power abides transfused from sire to son:

The boy feels deeper meanings thrill his ear,
That tingling through his pulse life-long shall run,
With sure impulsion to keep honor clear,

When, pointing down, his father whispers, "Here,
Here, where we stand, stood he, the purely Great,
Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere,
Then nameless, now a power and mixed with fate."
Historic town, thou holdest sacred dust,
Once known to men as pious, learned, just,
And one memorial pile that dares to last;
But Memory greets with reverential kiss
No spot in all thy circuit sweet as this,
Touched by that modest glory as it past,
O'er which yon elm hath piously displayed
These hundred years its monumental shade.

2.

Of our swift passage through this scenery
Of life and death, more durable than we,
What landmark so congenial as a tree
Repeating its green legend every spring,
And, with a yearly ring,

Recording the fair seasons as they flee,
Type of our brief but still renewed mortality?
We fall as leaves: the immortal trunk remains,
Builded with costly juice of hearts and brains
Gone to the mould now, whither all that be
Vanish returnless, yet are procreant still
In human lives to come of good or ill,
And feed unseen the roots of Destiny.

II.
I.

Men's monuments, grown old, forget their names
They should eternize, but the place

Where shining souls have passed imbibes a grace

1 Reprinted for the Old South Leaflets by special permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Beyond mere earth; some sweetness of their fames
Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace,

Pungent, pathetic, sad with nobler aims,

That penetrates our lives and heightens them or shames. This insubstantial world and fleet

Seems solid for a moment when we stand

On dust ennobled by heroic feet

Once mighty to sustain a tottering land,
And mighty still such burthen to upbear,

Nor doomed to tread the path of things that merely were:
Our sense, refined with virtue of the spot,
Across the mists of Lethe's sleepy stream
Recalls him, the sole chief without a blot,
No more a pallid image and a dream,

But as he dwelt with men decorously supreme.

2.

Our grosser minds need this terrestrial hint
To raise long-buried days from tombs of print:
"Here stood he," softly we repeat,

And lo, the statue shrined and still

In that gray minster-front we call the Past,
Feels in its frozen veins our pulses thrill,

Breathes living air and mocks at Death's deceit.
It warms, it stirs, comes down to us at last,
Its features human with familiar light,

A man, beyond the historian's art to kill,

Or sculptor's to efface with patient chisel-blight.

3.

Sure the dumb earth hath memory, nor for naught
Was Fancy given, on whose enchanted loom

Present and Past commingle, fruit and bloom

Of one fair bough, inseparably wrought

Into the seamless tapestry of thought.

So charmed, with undeluded eye we see

In history's fragmentary tale

Bright clews of continuity,

Learn that high natures over Time prevail,

And feels ourselves a link in that entail

That binds all ages past with all that are to be.

III.
I.

Beneath our consecrated elm

A century ago he stood,

Famed vaguely for that old fight in the wood

Whose red surge sought, but could not overwhelm
The life foredoomed to wield our rough-hewn helm:
From colleges, where now the gown

To arms had yielded, from the town,

Our rude self-summoned levies flocked to see
The new-come chiefs and wonder which was he.
No need to question long; close-lipped and tall,
Long trained in murder-brooding forests lone
To bridle others' clamors and his own,
Firmly erect, he towered above them all,
The incarnate discipline that was to free
With iron curb that armed democracy.

2.

A motley rout was that which came to stare,