John Adams was an erratic wrist, and so when a 28-page of his diary turned up Vermont, it was the sort of surprise that scholars editing The Papers for the last decade have come to expect.

His diary, published in four with is autobiography 1961, had been thought to be complete, but the Adams had kept yet journal, this one shorter even less systematic than of his others. And this , uncovered among the of the Vermont Judge who wooed Adam's daughter, is earliest one scholars have looked most likely the first diary ever kept.

The fragment, now brown and with age, torn and faded places, was begun in 1753, Adams was a sophomore Harvard. For two years made sporadic, usually entries in the book, covered an incredible array of related subjects. In one he notes material covered science lectures. Elsewhere reflects on the state of human and at one point on the possibility of moral- among animal tribes.

He's impulsive," explains Butterfield, who has spent last 11 years editing The Papers for the Belknap of Harvard University . "He won't put down a lot of things that you wish he would, and then he will put down a lot of things you're surprises to find. But he's a great stylist. He says things that would be commonplace if said by anyone else, but he gives them a characteristics turn that makes what he writes worthy of perpetuation."

Adams scribbled profusely, if not extraordinarily legibly, and upon graduation from Harvard in 1755 he apparently abandoned the folio-sized diary he had begun in favor of less widely notebooks. In 1758, when he began his practice of law and was riding circuit form Maine to Cape Cod, he used to carry several of these littler books with him, jotting down impressions from time to time. As was his wont for most of his early diary-writing years (he kept a journal of some form or another until he left the Presidency), he followed no rigid pattern as to which books he wrote in. "He sometimes had three or four books going at once," according to Butterfield. "But he got a little formal about it when he went to Congress and became a public leader. Then he used storebought books. Before that, he used to make them himself."

Adams came back to his original diary for a brief time late in 1758, and the manuscript for that period includes drafts of a half dozen letters to various friends. Adams had just set up his law practice in Braintree (now Quincy). His first case involved a dispute between tow of his neighbors over some horses breaking through a fence and trampling crops. Adams lost it, and, somewhat dismayed, he wrote a former classmate, in a letter drafted in the diary;

"And how I... find my self entering an unlimited Field in which Demosthenes, Ciecre, and others of immortal Fame have exulted before me! A field which incloses the whole Circle of Science and Literature, the History, Wisdom, and Virtue of all Ages. Shall I dare to expatiate here in full Career, like the Nobler Animals, that range at large, or shall I blindly, basely creep, like the male, or the mussell?--Tell me."

But if Adams was worried about this future, he also had great hopes and greater ambition. "What are the Motives, that ought to urge me to hard study?" he asked himself in one entry.

The Desire of Fame, Fortune and personal Pleasure. A critical Knowledge of the Greek and Roman and French Poetry, History and Oratory, a through comprehensive knowledge of natural, civil, commercial and Province Law, will draw upon me the Esteem and perhaps Admiration (the possibly the Envy too) of the Judges of both Courts, of the Lawyers and of Juries, who will spread my Fame thro the Province, will draw around me a Swarm of clients who will furnish me with a plentiful Provision for my own Support, and for the increase of my fortune.

"I shall be able to defend Innocence, to punish Guilt, and to promote Truth and Justice among mankind," Adams wrote, but his Nobel future was apparently threatened by subversion from within. "If I look upon a Law Book and labor to exert all my attention," reads a draft letter to an unidentified correspondent, my Eyes tis true are on the Book, but Imagination is at a Tea Table with Orlinda." He imagined "a scene of Pleasure ... which seems to be grappled to my soul with Hooks of Steal, as immoveably as I wish to grapple in my Arms the Nimph who gives it all its ornaments."

Twenty-five years later however, he was less tolerant of such ardor and was deeply concerned by a young Braintree lawyer's attachment to his 17-year-old daughter Abigail. "I ask not Fortune nor Favour," Adams wrote his wife from France, "but Prudence, Talents and Labor. She may go with Consent where ever she can find enough of these."

The young lawyer, Royall Tyler, met Abigail--or "Nabby," as her family called her -- in Braintree in 1782. Tyler was already known as something of a writer, and Mrs. Adams wrote her husband, "I am not acquainted with any young Gentleman whose attainments in literature are equal to his." Adams was far from taken with the idea of Tyler as a son-in-law. "I don't like the subject at all," he wrote back. "I am not looking out for a Poet, not a Professor of belle Letters... My Children will have nothing but their Liberty and the Right to catch Fish on the Banks of Newfoundland."

A few days later he wrote, "I don't like the Trait in his character, his Gaiety," and cautioned his wife that if Tyler retained "a Trait of Frivolity or dissapation," the romance should be terminated. Mrs. Adam's approval of the attachment was less tentative, and eventually she had mellowed her husband's attitude towards Tyler to the point where, when the young man formally requested "the sanction of your appropation to my addresses," Adams replied:

Your connections and Education are too respectable for me to entertain any objections to them. Your Profession is that for which I have the highest Respect and Veneration. The Testimonies I have received of your personal Character and Conduct are such as ought to remove all Scruples upon that head.

And in a final burst of gen-1