productive when the eye of the master was wanting. He can scarcely be said to have had a choice of vocations. He was the last person in the world to think of the army or navy as a career; and, if he had, it would not have been possible, perhaps, for him to get a commission. It was not as a "midshipman" that Washington's mother thought of sending her son to sea, but as a sailor before the mast: such was the narrow choice a parent had then in Virginia for younger sons. The very letter which discloses this unexpected piece of information shows how few employments were exercised in the Province. Mrs. Washington mentioned the scheme of sending George to sea, to her brother, Joseph Ball, in London. That gentleman replied, that she had better put him an apprentice to a tinker; "for," said he, "a common sailor before the mast has by no means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him from a ship where he has fifty shillings a month, and make him take twenty-three, and cut and slash him, and use him like a negro, or rather like a dog." And even (he proceeds to say) if the lad should work his way to the top of the ladder, and become the master of a Virginia ship, a "very difficult thing to do," a planter that has three or four hundred acres of land and three or four slaves, if he be ir dustrious, may live more comfortably, and leave his family in better bread, than such a captain can.* And so the mother thought bette of her project, and George Washington did not attempt the difficult achievement of rising to be master of a tobacco-ship. There were no manufactures in the Province, except the very rudest and crudest. People sent to London for every thing that slaves could not make, even window-sashes and the commoner implements. The commerce was in British hands. There was, of course, no art, no literature, no journalism, and nothing that could tempt intelligence or ambition in the medical profession. If Thomas Jefferson had been reared in a European capital, the first wish of his heart would have been to be an artist of some kind. After toying with music for a while, he would perhaps have fixed upon architecture as his profession. In Virginia, at Williamsburg, with George Wythe for a daily associate, he must needs become a lawyer; and accordingly, in 1763, after two years' residence at the college, he began, under Mr. Wythe's direction, the study of the law. * Meade's Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia, vol. li. p. 128. Perhaps the example of his jovial young acquaintance, Patrick Henry, first turned his thoughts to the legal profession. In 1760, a few days after his arrival in Williamsburg, who should present himself at his room in the college but the merry Patrick! But he had come on a serious errand. He was bent on a change in his mode of life, that had important consequences for his country as well as himself. He told the student, that since they had parted, after the Christmas holidays, two or three months before, he had studied law! He had studied it, in fact, six weeks; and he had now come to Williamsburg to get a license to practise. And he got it! Of the four examiners, only one, George Wythe, persisted in refusing his signature; and the three names sufficing, he went off triumphant, to tend his father-in-law's tavern for four years longer, until his opportunity came. Our student made no such haste. It was not in his nature to slight his work, and he prepared himself for a four years' course of reading. CHAPTER VII. JEFFERSON IN LOVE. His college days were over when he had been two years a student at William and Mary; and he went home in December, 1762, with Coke upon Lyttleton in his trunk, to spend the winter in reading law. He made the journey in his usual leisurely way, visiting friends near the road, and found himself, about Christmas time, at a friend's house half a day's ride from his own Shadwell. There he staid for two or three days, taking part in the festivities of the season, to which he could always contribute his violin. On this occasion he had brought with him a roll of new minuets for the young ladies; and doubtless he did his part toward the entertainment of the company. But he had left his heart behind him at Williamsburg. He had danced too many minuets in the Apollo-the great room of the old Raleigh tavern - with Miss Rebecca Burwell, one of the orphan daughters of a great house near the capital; and she had given him a watch-paper, cut and painted with her own lovely hands; and he found his mind dwelling night and day upon her sweet image. He had packed his Coke at Williamsburg, with the most virtuous resolutions of reading him, even amid the gayeties of the holiday time; but the work lay in his trunk untouched. He even wrote to his college friend, John Page, that he wished the Devil had old Coke, for he was sure he never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in his life. "What!" he says, are there so few inquietudes tacked to this momentary life of ours, that we must needs be loading ourselves with a thousand more?" How different this from the tone of fond regard with which he speaks, in the grave letters of his maturer years, of Coke and his works. But he was in love; and he was writing on a Christmas Day, a hundred miles from the object of his affection. 66 He had risen on that joyful morning to face what must have been, to a young fellow in love for the first time, a dreadful catastrophe. He told his friend Page that he was in a house surrounded by enemies, who took counsel together against his soul; who, when he lay down to rest, said, Come, let us destroy him! In the night the "cursed rats,” at the instigation of the Devil, if there was a Devil, had eaten his pocket-book within a foot of his head, carried off his "jemmy-worked silk garters," and all those new minuets. But these were trifles. It had rained in the night; and in the morning he found his watch all afloat in a pool of water, and as silent as the rats that had eaten his pocket-book. But this was not the catastrophe. "The subtle particles of the water with which the case was filled, had, by their penetration, so overcome the cohesion of the particles of the paper of which my dear picture and watch-paper were composed, that, in attempting to take them out to dry themgood God! Mens horret referre! - my fingers gave them such a rent, as I fear I never shall get over." He is so overcome by the recollection, that he cannot keep up the jocular strain, but breaks into a serious invocation. Whatever misfortunes may attend the picture or the lover, his hearty prayers shall be, that all the health and happiness which Heaven can send may be the portion of the original, and that so much goodness may ever meet with what is most agreeable in this world, as he is sure it must in the next. "And now," he adds, "although the picture may be defaced, there is so lively an image of her imprinted in my mind, that I shall think of her too often, I fear, for my peace of mind, and too often, I am sure, to get through old Coke this winter." Message upon message he sends to the young ladies at Williamsburg, with whom, he says, the better part of him, his soul, ever is, though that heavy, earthly part, his body, may be absent. With one he has a bet pending of a pair of silk garters; which the rats knew he was destined to win, else they never could have been so cruel as to carry off the pair he had. And oh, would Miss Burwell give him another watch-paper of her own cutting? What does dear Page think? Would he ask her? A watch-paper cut by her fingers, though it were only "a plain round one," he should esteem much more than the nicest one in the world cut by other hands. Another young lady, he had heard, was offended with him. What could it be for? Neither in word nor deed had he ever, in all his life, been guilty of the least disrespect to her; and, no matter what she might say or do, he was determined ever to look upon her as "the same honest-hearted, good-humored, agreeable lady" he had always thought her. So full was he of Williamsburg and its lovely girls,-"Sukey Potter," "Betsy Moore," "Judy Burwell," "Nancy," and, above all, "Becca Burwell," otherwise "Belinda," the adored one, — that, on this Christmas Day, 1762, he wrote a letter about them that would have filled a dozen of our trivial modern sheets of paper. It well became him to write such an epistle on his nineteenth ChristYoung men of nineteen still write such who have preserved their innocence. mas. He was at home soon after Christmas. Absence only made his heart grow fonder. He missed the gayety and variety, the friends and stir of life and business at the capital. He found the old farmhouse dull. There must have been something uncongenial there, else so affectionate a youth, the head of the family, would not have spent his Christmases away from home. Perhaps his mother was oppressed by the care of a family of eight children and thirty slaves; or she may have agreed with that small portion of the clergy who regarded the fiddle and the minuet as a "profanation" of Christmas. However that may be, this sudden change from the Apollo and the palace, from college friends and employments, to a farm-house on the frontier and Coke's digest of law, was almost too much for his philosophy. He could hardly muster spirits to write to his friend Page. When he had been at home three weeks, he wrote a short letter, which shows him reduced to a sorry plight indeed. He was torn with the contest raging in his soul between his passion and his judgment; and he plunges into a letter, as it were head-foremost, seeking relief in converse with his friend, with whom he had been accustomed to exchange such confidences: "Dear Page, to tell you the plain truth, I have not a syllable to write to you about;" which was a lover's way of stating that his heart was full to bursting. "I do not conceive," he continues, "that any thing can happen in my world which you would give a curse to know." The worlds of these two friends were indeed unlike; for John Page, heir to one of the largest estates, lived in the largest mansion of all Virginia,- Roswell, -which stands to this day near the banks of the York River, a vast square barrack, treeless, fenceless, dismantled, a pile without inhabitant, a picture of desolation. "All things here," the dis |