and when Mary followed, a sylph in form, face, and step, they all fell apart, and made a lane for them to pass, holding up their children to see them, and uttering many a cry of rapturous approval. The father and daughters entered the house at length; the carriage rolled away; the negroes went off chattering to their quarters; and there was quiet again at Monticello. "Such a scene," wrote Martha Jefferson long after, "I never witnessed in my life." As late as 1851, Mr. Randall heard a vivid description of it at Monticello, from an aged negro who was one of the boys of the joyful crowd.

The merry Christmas passed. One of the first visitors from beyond the immediate neighborhood was James Madison, who was about starting for New York to attend Congress. General Washington, it seems, had requested him to call at Monticello, and ascertain more exactly the state of Mr. Jefferson's mind with regard to the appointment. "I was sorry," Madison wrote to the president, January 4, 1790, "to find him so little biassed in favor of the domestic service allotted him, but was glad that his difficulties seemed to result chiefly from what I take to be an erroneous view of the kind and quantity of business." To the foreign department alone he felt equal, but he dreaded the new and unknown duties which had been annexed to that. Upon receiving this information, the president wrote again to Jefferson. The new business, he thought, would not be arduous; and, if it should prove so, doubtless Congress would apply a remedy. The office, in the president's opinion, was very impor tant, on many accounts; and he knew of no one who could better execute it. He added a remark sure to have great weight with Jefferson, as, indeed, it ought: "In order that you may be better prepared to make your ultimate decision on good grounds, I think it necessary to add one fact, which is this, that your late appointment has given very extensive and very great satisfaction to the public." Still the president would not urge acceptance. He merely said, with regard to his own feelings, "My original opinion and wish may be collected from my nomination." Jefferson yielded without further parley. "I no longer hesitate," he wrote February 11, "to undertake the office to which you are pleased to call me." So Mr. Short had to break up the establishment at Paris, and send home the accumulated treasures of five years' haunting of Paris bookstalls and curiosity-shops.

The day after accepting office, a committee of his old constituents

of Albemarle arrived at Monticello, and presented an address of congratulation and commendation. It was unusually cordial and interesting. They sketched his whole public career with approval; and felicitated themselves upon the fact, that it was they who had introduced him to public life. Above all his other services, they extolled "the strong attachment he had always shown to the rights of mankind, and to those institutions that were best calculated to preserve them." Much as they should like to enjoy his services again, they assured him that they were too much attached to the common interests of their country, and too sensible of his merit, not to unite with the general voice that called him "to continue in her councils." In his reply, he again seized the opportunity to recall attention to first principles. The favor of his neighbors, he said, was, indeed, "the door through which he had been ushered on the stage of public life;" and, after becoming reference to that circumstance, he added these words, which contain the chief article of his political creed :

"We have been fellow-laborers and fellow-sufferers; and Heaven has rewarded us with a happy issue from our struggles. It rests now with ourselves alone to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of self-government, so long denied to mankind; to show by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs; and that the will of the majority. the natural law of every society — is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary, and shortlived. Let us then, my dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of the society. We are safe with that, even in its deviations, for it soon returns again to the right way."

The lovers, meanwhile, were improving their time. February 23, 1790, the wedding occurred at Monticello. The clergyman who performed the ceremony was Mr. Maury, son of Jefferson's schoolmaster. Young Randolph was heir to large estates; and the pair, after living a while at Monticello, settled on land in the neighborhood. For a single week Jefferson witnessed and shared the happiness of his children; and then, in obedience to General Washington's urgent desire, he set out for New York. The president had already kept the office six months for him; business was accumu

lating; he might well be a little impatient to see his secretary of

state.

What a journey Jefferson had of it in the wet and stormy March of 1790! Twenty-one days of hard travel, including brief rests at Richmond, Alexandria, Baltimore, and Philadelphia! Delightful as old-fashioned travel may have been to a home-returning plenipotentiary, leisure being abundant, and the season propitious, it was misery to a secretary of state overdue, in chill and oozy March, at a point four hundred miles distant. He sent his carriage round to Alexandria in advance, intending to go in it the rest of the way. At that ancient and flourishing port, where he paused one day, he received an address from the mayor and citizens; from which we learn that his labors in behalf of commerce had become known to parties interested. The Alexandrians, besides approving his exertions in "the sacred cause of freedom," had a word of thanks for "the indulgences which his enlightened representations to the court of France had secured to their trade;" adding these words: "You have freed commerce from its shackles, and destroyed the first essay made in this country towards establishing a monopoly." The last remark was aimed, probably, at British merchants and their resident agents, who still had a tight grip upon Virginia estates, and did not want any Virginia ships to go to Havre. Jefferson waived this compliment with his usual excess of modesty, but did not refrain from a sentence or two upon general politics:

"Convinced that the republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind, my prayers and efforts shall be cordially contributed to the support of that we have so happily established. . . . It is, indeed, an animating thought, that, while we are securing the rights of ourselves and our posterity, we are pointing out the way to struggling nations, who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also. Heaven help their struggles, and lead them, as it has done us, triumphantly through them!"

All this was cordial to the people of that day, who had scarcely heard, as yet, that there were Americans who felt otherwise. No one could say, in March, 1790, that it was the partisan who spoke such words.

During the night of his stay at Alexandria, a late winter storm covered the ground with snow to the depth of eighteen inches. He therefore left his carriage to be sent round by sea, and took a place in the stage, his horses being left, and ridden after him by his servants. So bad were the roads, that the lumbering vehicle, as he wrote back to his son-in-law, "could never go more than three miles an hour, sometimes not more than two, and in the night but one." During the few hours of his stay at Philadelphia, he had his last interview with Dr. Franklin, who was then on the bed 'from which he was to be borne, a month after, to his coffin. The old man, whose mental faculties seemed to remain undiminished to the last, listened with flushed face to Jefferson's narrative of all that had occurred lately in France. He asked eagerly what part his friends there had taken, what had been their course amid the torrent of events, and what their fate. Jefferson had volumes to impart to him, and Franklin was almost exhausted by the intensity of his interest in what he heard.

Sunday, March 21, 1790, "after as laborious a journey as I ever went through," Jefferson reached New York. A paragraph of a line and a half in the principal newspaper of the town announced his arrival; but, as he attacked immediately the accumulated business of his office, his name soon begins to appear at the end of public documents, below that of "G. Washington." The amount of work in prospect was a little alarming. Finding no suitable house vacant in "the Broadway," he hired a small one, No. 57 Maiden Lane, while he could look about him; for it was his habit and intention to keep house in comfortable style. The salary of his office then was three thousand five hundred dollars a year, five hundred more than the salaries of his colleagues in the cabinet. Hamilton lived in Pine Street, where so many lawyers still labor, but not live; and Colonel Aaron Burr was plodding at the law in Nassau Street, near Wall, where he had a large garden and grapery. Jefferson appears to have startled mankind by continuing at first to wear his French clothes, even red breeches and red waistcoat, the fashion in Paris.

CHAPTER XL.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON.

WITH whatever reluctance and dread Jefferson may have accepted the office of secretary of state, his forebodings were realized. After five years' residence in Paris at the most interesting period of its history; after a kind of triumphal progress through Virginia, where delegations of grateful and admiring citizens had saluted him with addresses of congratulation; after some peerless weeks at Monticello, crowded with old friends and relatives gathered to attend his daughter's wedding, he found himself, in the early spring of 1790, just when his gardens at home were fullest of allurement, closeted with four clerks (the whole force of his department), face to face with a Monticello of despatches, documents, applications, many of which were bulky and important papers, requiring close attention and hard work. It was like going to school after a particularly joyous vacation,-inky grammar and damp dictionary, instead of gun and picnic; keen contests with uncomplimentary equals and rivals, instead of the easily won applause of partial friends and affectionate sisters. He had enjoyed much and done much during the past few years: he was now to be tried and tested. The summer of his growth was suspended; the wintry blast was to blow upon him a while, pruning and hardening him. A tree does not look so pretty during this season, but the timber ought to improve. He had a cordial welcome in New York. General Washington was relieved to find his cabinet complete after the new government had existed nearly a year, and glad to have near him a Virginian whom he knew, from of old, to be in singular accord with the American people. The leading citizens threw open their doors to him. Among members of Congress, whom should he find but that genial comrade of his youth, John Page? Oddly enough, one of