A LIFE DEVOTED TO FAMILY. 237 and her temperament unfitted her for familiarity with the people, and kept her from being popular in the sense that Mrs. Madison was. The difference between these two women was that the latter was fond of company, enjoyed life and had a healthy, hearty interest in the events transpiring about her. The other lived in retirement as far as possible, and the record of so quiet an existence is not as familiar to the people of this country as is that of those of her contemporaries who occupied the high place she filled. Society was differently organized in her time than it is now. It is difficult to realize that newspaper correspondents were the exception and not the rule, and that public attention was rarely directed to ladies; whereas now it is impossible for women in semi-official life to keep themselves out of the multitudinous prints of the day, object as they may. VI. LOUISA CATHERINE ADAMS. MRS. ADAMS was the sixth in the succession of occupants of the Executive Mansion, and with her closed the list of the ladies of the Revolution. A new generation had sprung up in the forty-nine years of Independence, and after her retirement, younger aspirants claimed the honors. Born in the city of London on the 12th of February, 1775, she received advantages superior to those enjoyed by most of the ladies of America. Her father, Mr. Johnson, of Maryland, although living at the outbreak of the war, in England, was ever a patriotic American, and soon after hostilities commenced, removed with his family to Nantes, in France. "There he received from the Federal Congress an appointment as Commissioner to examine the accounts of all the American functionaries then entrusted with the public money of the United States, in Europe; in the exercise of the duties of which he continued until the peace of 1782. Our National Independence having then been recognized, he returned to London, where he continued to reside, and where he acted as consular agent for the United States, until his final return in 1797, to his native soil." It was fortunate for Mrs. Adams that her husband was a strong, intellectual nature; he both satisfied and |