6/11/2023 0 Comments Dearest friend abigail adams![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Catching smallpox “in the natural way” left eighteen per cent of its victims dead, the rest mutilated. This fear of the smallpox which terrorized the eighteenth century has no modern analogy. “I dare not trust my self with the thought.” Meanwhile, the letters flowed back and forth between her home at Weymouth and Boston, where John’s were smoked upon leaving his house, thus disinfecting them, it was believed, against spread of the infection. How much longer would they be apart? Abigail wondered. ![]() “Do you remember how the poor Bird 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 smokeing my Letters.” For they were from her suitor, John Adams, now in the second week of quarantine for a self-imposed case of smallpox, and in the first of what would be a lifetime of separations from his lady love. “Did you never rob a Birds nest?” she wrote her correspondent. On a cool Massachusetts morning in April, 1764, a girl named Abigail Smith watched anxiously as a servant held a bundle of letters in a fire tongs over a smouldering flame. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |