"Everything bears a very great price. The merchant complains of the farmer and the farmer of the merchant,—both are extravagant. Living is double what it was one year ago.
"I find you have licensed tea, but I am determined not to be a purchaser unless I can have it at Congress price, and in that article the vendors pay no regard to Congress, asking ten, eight, and the lowest is seven and sixpence per pound. I should like a little green, but they say there is none to be had here. I only wish it for a medicine, as a relief to a nervous pain in my head to which I am sometimes subject. Were it as plenty as ever, I would not practice the use of it."
Beside spinning, weaving and making all the clothing, Mrs. Adams and her maids must make all the soap for the family; this was a regular part of the housewife's duty, and a disagreeable part it was.
"You inquire of me," she writes, "whether I am making saltpetre. I have not yet attempted it, but after soap-making believe I shall make the experiment. I find as much as I can do to manufacture clothing for my family, which would else be naked."
Many women were making saltpetre for the gunpowder; let us hope they had fewer other necessary occupations than Mrs. Adams.
Be sure that with all the plainer parts of housewifery, Abby was also instructed in its graces. We can picture her sitting by her mother's side (Brother Johnny, perhaps, reading aloud the while from "Rollin's Ancient History," a work which he found entrancing) working at her sampler, or knitting a purse for Papa, far away, or mittens for her brothers. All the mittens and stockings, of course, were made at home as well as the clothes. Mitten knitting could be a fine art in those days. We read that one "young New Hampshire girl, using fine flaxen yarn, knit the whole alphabet and a verse of poetry into a pair of mittens!" Then there is the wonderful story of Nancy Peabody. How her brother, coming in from work at night, announced that he had lost his mittens. How Nancy ran to the garret for wool, carded and spun a big hank of yarn that night, soaked and scoured it next morning, and as soon as it was dry, sat down to knit. "In twenty-four hours from the time the brother announced his loss he had a fine new pair of double mittens." "I tell the tale as I've heard told."
Did Abby learn netting with all the rest? Doubtless she did. Lady Washington set the fashion, and netted so well and so industriously that all her family were proud of trimming their dresses with her work. Then there was quilting, a fine art indeed in those days, and the exquisite embroidery which we find in our grandmothers' cupboards, and over which we sigh partly in admiration, partly in compassion for the eyes which were so cruelly tried; and a dozen other niceties and exquisitenesses of needlework. To quote the advertisement of Mrs. Sarah Wilson, who kept a boarding-school for girls in Philadelphia:
"Young ladies may be educated in a genteel manner, and pains taken to teach them in regard to their behaviour, on reasonable terms. They may be taught all sorts fine needlework, viz., working on catgut or flowering muslin, sattin stitch, quince stitch, tent stitch, cross-stitch, open work, tambour, embroidering curtains or chairs, writing and cyphering. Likewise waxwork in all its several branches, never as yet particularly taught here; also how to take profiles in wax, to make wax flowers and fruits and pinbaskets."
Boston would not be behind Philadelphia in matters of high fashion.
In the Boston News-Letter, in August, 1716, we read: