always a desirable inmate, despite his hereditary love of botany, and his genuine regard for his father-in-law.

Maria Jefferson, now seventeen years of age, attracted the French traveller; and he easily read the open secret of her young life. "Miss Maria," he observes, "constantly resides with her father; but as she is seventeen years old, and is remarkably handsome, she will doubtless soon find that there are duties which it is sweeter to perform than those of a daughter." "Jack Eppes" may have been one of the Monticello circle during those pleasant June days of 1796, when the Duke de la Rochefoucauld surprised Mr. Jefferson in the harvest-field under a scorching sun. Perhaps the guest of the house may have said to the young college-student what he recorded in his narrative. He may even have accompanied the remark with the nearest thing to a wink which the politeness of the ancien régime permitted. "Mr. Jefferson's philosophic mind," observes the exile, "his love of study, his excellent library, which supplies him with the means of satisfying it, and his friends, will undoubtedly help him to endure this loss; which, moreover, is not likely to become an absolute privation, as the second son-in-law of Mr. Jefferson may, like Mr. Randolph, reside in the vicinity of Monticello, and, if he be worthy of Miss Maria, will not be able to find any company more desirable than that of Mr. Jefferson."

But the horses await their riders. We may be sure that both gentlemen were well mounted. Virginia took the lead of all the thirteen colonies in breeding horses; and Jefferson, though he differed from his countrymen in things more important, surpassed them in his love of fine horses. And, curiously enough, it was only in dealing with horses that he was ever known to show any thing of that spirit of domination which marks some varieties of common men. With a pilfering negro, an uncomfortable neighbor, a refractory child, or a perverse colleague, his patience seemed inexhaustible; but let a horse rebel, and the lash instantly descended, and the battle never ceased until the animal had discovered which of the two held the reins. He always loved the exhilaration of a race, and did not permit false ideas of official decorum to prevent his attending races near the seat of government, no matter what office he may have held. The saddle alone was his test of the quality of a horse, the trotting-wagon being unknown in the land of corduroy roads. Jefferson and the horsemen of that age liked to share the labor and

peril of the ride with the horse, seeking no vantage-ground of a vehicle from which to exercise mastery over him. He liked a horse fiery and sure-footed, that could gallop down his mountain on a dark night, and carry him through flood and mire safe to the next village, while a negro would be fumbling over the broken bridle of his mule. On this occasion, however, there was no need of haste, and the two gentlemen descended at their ease the winding road to the country below. The French agriculturist was too polite to hint that his American brother's methods were defective; and yet he appears to have thought so. Mr. Jefferson, he intimates, was a book-farmer. "Knowledge thus acquired often misleads," the exile remarks, and "yet it is preferable to mere practical knowledge." In arranging his new system, Mr. Jefferson had betrayed a mathematical taste. All the old, unsightly fences, with their masses of bushes and brambles, having been swept away, he had divided his cultivated land into four farms of two hundred and eighty acres each, and divided each farm into seven fields of forty acres, marking the boundaries by a row of peach-trees, of which he set out eleven hundred and fifty-one during his first year at home. The seven fields indicated his new system of rotation, which embraced seven years: first year, wheat; second, corn; third, pease or potatoes; fourth, vetches; fifth, wheat again; sixth and seventh, clover. Each of the four farms, under its own overseer, was cultivated by four negroes, four negresses, four horses, and four oxen; but at harvest and other busy times the whole working-force was concentrated. Upon each farm Mr. Jefferson had caused to be built a great log-barn, at little cost except the labor of the slaves.

He did not fail to show his guest the new threshing-machine imported from Scotland, where it was invented, the first specimen ever seen in Virginia. It answered its purpose so well, that several planters of the State had sent for machines, or were trying to get them made at home. "This machine," records the traveller, "the whole of which does not weigh two thousand pounds, is conveyed from one farm to another in a wagon, and threshes from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty bushels a day." Mr. Jefferson showed him, also, a drilling-machine for sowing seed in rows, invented in the neighborhood, with the performance of which the master of Monticello was well pleased. Doubtless the two farmers discussed again that plough of Mr. Jefferson's invention for which

he had received, in 1790, a gold medal from France. During his European tours he had been struck with the waste of power caused by the bad construction of the ploughs in common use. The part of the plough called then the mould-board, which is above the share, and turns over the earth, seemed to him the chief seat of error; and he spent many of the leisure hours of his last two years in France in evolving from Euclid the mould-board which should offer the minimum of resistance. Nothing is more likely than that he had discussed the subject many a time in Paris with so ardent an agriculturist as the Duke de la Rochefoucauld. Satisfied, at length, that he had discovered precisely the best form of mouldboard, he sent a plough provided with one to the Royal Agricultural Society of the Seine, of which the duke was a member. The medal which they awarded it followed the inventor to New York; and, eighteen years after, the society sent President Jefferson a superh plough containing his improvement.

An agreeable incident in connection with that plough invention has been reported. Among the many young Virginians who were educated under the direction of Mr. Jefferson was the late William C. Rives, born almost in the shadow of Monticello. In 1853, when, for the second time, Mr. Rives was American Minister at Paris, he was elected a member of the Agricultural Society, then temporarily dishonored by the prefix "Imperial" to its name. In his address at his public reception, Mr. Rives alluded to the prize bestowed by the society half a century before upon one of his predecessors. "Yes," said the president, "we still have, and will show you, the prize plough of Thomas Jefferson."

The French traveller was interested in seeing at Monticello a principality of two hundred inhabitants almost independent of the world without; for Mr. Jefferson showed him a cluster of little shops wherein his own negroes carried on all the necessary trades, such as carpentry, cabinet-making, shoe-making, tailoring, weaving. The masonry of the rising mansion was also executed by slaves. There was a mill upon the estate for the accommodation of the neighborhood. For many years the making of nails had been one of the winter industries of American farmers, all nails being then of the wrought description; and Mr. Jefferson, too, had his nail-forge, wherein a foreman and half a dozen men and boys hammered out nails for the country round about. When James Monroe built his

house near by, it was from his former instructor that he bought his nails. At times Jefferson had as many as ten nailers at work, – two fires, and five hands at each fire; and he supplied the country stores far and near with nails, at an excellent rate of profit. His weaving-house grew, also, into a little factory of sixty spindles, producing cotton cloth enough for all his plantations, as well as a redundancy for the village stores. Some of the black mechanics whom the exile saw on his friend's estate were among the best workmen in Virginia. One man is spoken of as being a universal genius in handiwork. He painted the mansion, made some of its best furniture, repaired the mill, and lent a hand in that prodigious structure of the olden time, a family coach, planned by the

master.

The duke bears testimony to the kind, considerate way in which the slaves were treated. They had not only substantial justice, he tells us, but received special reward for special excellence. In the distribution of clothes, Mr. Randall adds, it was a system at Monticello to give better and handsomer garments to those who lived decently together in families than to the unmarried, an expedient which had obvious good results. This was not freedom; but, in the Virginia of that period, there was room and chance of welfare for every kind of creature, excepting a free negro.

The exile remained a week at Monticello in June, 1796, and then left his brother farmer to pursue his labors. "On several occasions," the duke records, "I heard him speak with great respect of the virtues of the president, and in terms of esteem of his sound and unerring judgment." He adds these remarks: "In private life, Mr. Jefferson displays a mild, easy, and obliging temper, though he is somewhat cold and reserved. His conversation is of the most agreeable kind, and he possesses a stock of information not inferior to that of any other man. In Europe he would hold a distinguished rank among men of letters, and as such he has already appeared there at present he is employed with activity and perseverance in the management of his farms and buildings; and he orders, directs, and pursues, in the minutest detail, every branch of business relative to them. I found him in the midst of the harvest, from which the scorching heat of the sun does not prevent his attendance.

CHAPTER LIV.

CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY.

HAD he, then, really accepted this plantation life as a career for the remainder of his days?

In the first exultation at his recovered ease and liberty, in 1794, he thought he had. "I return to farming," he wrote to his old friend and colleague, John Adams, in the midst of the joyous April work of that year, "with an ardor which I scarcely knew in my youth, and which has got the better entirely of my love of study. Instead of writing ten or twelve letters a day, which I have been in the habit of doing as a thing in course, I put off answering my letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day, and then find them sometimes postponed by other necessary occupations." At first, too, he was even indifferent to the newspapers. Young Buonaparte (he had not yet dropped the u from his Italian name) had cannonaded the English out of Toulon Harbor a few weeks before; and, though his name was still unknown, his genius was making itself felt in the organization of the French armies. The great Toulon news, which reached Monticello by private letters a month after the master's return, recalled him to his old self for a moment. He even indulged

in a little sanguine prophecy. "Over the foreign powers," he wrote in April, 1794, "I am convinced the French will triumph completely." The French, led by Napoleone di Buonaparte, a general of alien race, did triumph over the foreign powers; but the rest of Mr. Jefferson's anticipation, happily, was not realized: "I cannot but hope that that triumph, and the consequent disgrace of the invading tyrants, is destined, in the order of events, to kindle the wrath of the people of Europe against those who have dared to embroil them in such wickedness, and to bring, at length, kings, nobles, and priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long