ment erected to the memory of Hannah Adams, in Central Square, between Beech and Central Avenues, describes her as "the First Tenant of Mount Auburn." This is an error. The first interment in Mount Auburn was that of a child, July 6, 1832; the second, that of Mrs. Thomas Hastings, July 12, 1832. For some reason the body of Miss Adams, who died in December, 1831, was not removed to its last resting-place until November 12, 1832, before which date there had been eight interments.
      Miss Adams's claim to remembrance does not rest, however, upon such an accident as the date of her burial. She is quaintly described upon the monument as "Historian of the Jews and Reviewer of the Christian Sects"; and the stone, it is added, was "erected by her female friends." The women of her time had reason for doing honor to her, for she was the first American woman to make literature her vocation. Her "View of Religions," her "History of the Jews" and her "History of New England" long ago passed, not out of print merely, but out of memory. But of how many of the books that crowd the counters of the booksellers of to-day would one care to predict that they will be any better remembered in 1996 than are the writings which Hannah Adams put forth a century ago? A vast amount of toil went into those writings. In her quiet home in Medfield there were a few classics which she studied; but there were no great libraries at her disposal. Much of her writing was done in booksellers' shops, where she consulted books which she was too poor to buy. Yet somehow — timid as she was, in delicate health, and suffering from imperfect vision — she contrived to write her books, and to get them printed, and to have them sold, and to eke out some kind of a livelihood from the profits upon them. And when, in her first transaction with a publisher, she made a losing bargain, she petitioned Congress for a law securing to authors the copyright of their publications, and got what she asked for. Certainly many an impos-