JEFFERSON'S RETIREMENT TO MONTICELLO.

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timony of many tongues, that her existence was one of genial sunshine and peace. Are not such natures doubly blessed, first, in the happiness they secure to themselves, and, secondly, in the blessing they are to those who walk in the light of their example? With the retirement of Mr. Jefferson from public life, came a new trouble in the shape of innumerable visitors, and the seventeen years he lived at Monticello was one continued scene of new faces and old friends. Even after the loss of property and accumulated debts, he was compelled to entertain thoughtless crowds who made pilgrimages to his shrine. Time and again he would go to an adjoining estate to secure that rest and quiet so essential to his health; but these visits were never of long duration, for he could. not consent to be separated from his daughter, even though accompanied by his grandchildren. As the shadows began to darken round his earth-life, and bankruptcy to hover over him, he turned with redoubled affection to this idol, and she was strong and faithful to the last. Mother and sister she had buried, and she was yet strong enough to see her husband and father taken.

"There were few eminent men of our country who did not visit Mr. Jefferson in his retirement, to say nothing of distinguished foreigners." But all visitors were not as agreeable as "eminent men." "There are a number

of persons now living who have seen groups of utter strangers, of both sexes, planted in the passage between his study and dining-room, consulting their watches, and

waiting for him to pass from one to the other to his dinner, so that they could momentarily stare at him. A female once punched through a window-pane of the house with her parasol to get a better view of him. When sitting in the shade of his porticoes to enjoy the coolness of the approaching evening, parties of men and women would sometimes approach within a dozen yards, and gaze at him point-blank until they had looked their fill, as they would have gazed on a lion in a menagerie."

Mrs. Randolph was "the apple of her father's eye." All his letters bear witness to his affection, and all his life records this prominent sentiment of his heart. A gentleman writing to him for his views on a proper course of education for woman, he takes the opportunity of complimenting her unconsciously. "A plan of female education," he says, "has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me. It has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters occasionally required. Considering that they would be placed in a country situation where little aid could be obtained from abroad, I thought it essential to give them a solid education, which might enable them-when become mothers to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be lost, or incapable, or inattentive.

"My surviving daughter accordingly, the mother of many daughters as well as sons, has made their education the object of her life, and being a better judge of

the practical part than myself, it is with her aid and that of one of her élèves, that I shall subjoin a catalogue of the books for such a course of reading as we have practised."

Again, in a letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, he says:

"You kindly encourage me to keep up my spirits; but oppressed with disease, debility, age and embarrassed affairs, this is difficult. For myself, I should not regard a prostration of fortune; but I am overwhelmed at the prospect of the situation in which I may leave my family. My dear and beloved daughter, the cherished companion of my early life, and nurse of my age, and her children, rendered as dear to me as if my own, from having lived with me from their cradle, left in a comfortless situation, hold up to me nothing but future gloom; and I should not care were life to end with the line I am writing, were it not that in the unhappy state of mind which your father's misfortunes have brought upon him, I may yet be of some avail to the family."

Ex-President Jefferson died the 4th of July, 1826, and at nearly the same hour passed away the spirit of John Adams. He lingered a little behind Jefferson, and his last words, uttered in the failing articulation of the dying, were: "Jefferson still survives." Mrs. Randolph left no written account of the scene. On the 2d of July, Mr. Jefferson handed her a little casket. On opening it, after his death, she found a paper on which he had written the lines of Moore, commencing