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what then of their successors? Upon this point, he said, he could give only a personal assurance.

"It is my firm opinion, that the plan I have stated to you will certainly take place, and that it will never be departed from; and so determined am I ever to abide by it, that I will be content to be declared infamous, if I do not, to the last hour of my life, at all times, in all places, and upon all occasions, exert every power with which I am or shall be legally invested, in order to obtain and maintain for the continent of America that satisfaction which I have been authorized to promise this day, by the confidential servants of our gracious sovereign, who, to my certain knowledge, rates his honor so high, that he would rather part with his crown than preserve it by deceit."

Almost while he uttered these words, which seemed to pledge the king, the ministry, and himself, Lord North came into power, and renewed the strife. Lord Botetourt with indignation demanded his recall; but, before he obtained it, he died, as is supposed, of mortification at his inability to make good his emphatic assurances. Virginia did justice to his character, and placed his statue in the public square of Williamsburg.

For the present, however, all minds were content, and the parliament of Virginia proceeded with alacrity to business. The member from Albemarle received, during his second session, a rebuff more decided and more public than when his draught was so summarily set aside in his first.

What an absurd creature is man! This sanguine young burgess, now that all danger seemed past of his white countrymen being, as they termed it, "reduced to slavery," thought it a good time to endeavor to mitigate the oppression of his black countrymen, who were reduced to slavery already. He soon had the hornets about his ears. At that time, no man could free his slaves without sending them out of Virginia. Jefferson desired the repeal of this law. He wished to throw around the slaves what he calls "certain moderate extensions of the protection of the laws." With the proper modesty of a young member, he called the attention of Colonel Bland to this subject, secured his co-operation, and induced him to introduce the bill. "I seconded his motion," records Jefferson, "and, as

a younger member, was more spared in the debate; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the greatest indecorum"! And this, too, although Colonel Bland was "one of the oldest, ablest, and most-respected members"! Jefferson attributes this conduct to the habitual subservience of members to the mother country. "During the regal government," he says, "nothing liberal could expect success. Under no government has an assembly of slaveholders ever been otherwise than restive under attempts to limit their power over their slaves.

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CHAPTER XIII.

HIS MARRIAGE.

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THIS year, 1769, so fruitful of public events, was a busy and interesting one to the member from Albemarle in his private capacity. He was now in the fullest tide of practice at the bar, hundred and ninety-eight cases before the. General Court, the greatest number he ever reached in a year. Already he had chosen Monticello as the site of his future home. He had had men chopping and clearing on the summit for some time; and, in the spring of this year, he had an orchard planted on one of its slopes. Between the two sessions he superintended the construction of a brick wing of the coming mansion, one pretty large room with a chamber or two over it, under the roof. The General Court sat in April. During December and January he was preparing for the court, making briefs, taking notes, collecting precedents; getting every thing, according to his custom, upon paper, and then dismissing it from his mind. On the 1st of February, 1770, his mother and himself went from home to visit a neighbor. While they were at the neighbor's house, a slave came to them, breathless, to say that their house and all its contents were burned. After the man had finished his account of the catastrophe, the master asked, "But

were none of my books saved?" A grin of exultation overspread the sable countenance. "No, master," said the negro, "but we

saved the fiddle!"

Two hundred pounds' worth of books gone, besides all his lawpapers, and notes of cases coming on in April for trial! Nothing saved but a few old volumes of his father's library, and some unimportant manuscript books of his own. His mother and the children found temporary shelter in the house of an overseer; and he repaired to his unfinished nest on the mountain-top, where he vainly

strove to reconstruct his cases for the coming term. It was an iron rule of that primitive court, never to grant an adjournment of a case to another term. How he made it up with his clients and the court, no one has told us.

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That house which he was constructing on Monticello was strangely in his thoughts during the next year or two. When he was far away from home he brooded over it; and he used to solace the tedium of country inns by elaborately recording dreams of its coming fitness and beauty. It was his resolve that there should be one mansion in Virginia, for the design of which the genius of architecture should at least be invoked. He meant that there should be one home in Virginia worthy the occupation of perfectly civilized beings; in which art, taste, and utility should unite to produce an admirable result. What a piece of work it was to place such an abode on the summit of his little mountain, with no architect but himself, few workmen but slaves, no landscape-gardener within three thousand miles, no models to copy, no grounds to imitate, no tincture of high gardening in the Province. The bricks had to be made, the trees felled, the timber hewn, the nails wrought, the vehicles constructed, the laborers trained, on the scene of operations. No fine commodities could be bought nearer than Williamsburg, a hundred and fifty miles distant, nor many nearer than Europe. He had to send for even his sashes to London, where one lot was detained a month to let the putty harden! Nothing but the coarsest, roughest work could go on in his absence; and often the business stood still for weeks, for months, for years, while he was in public service. But he kept on with an indomitable pertinacity for a quarter of a century, at the expiration of which he had the most agreeable and refined abode in Virginia, filled with objects of taste and the means of instruction, and surrounded by beautiful lawns, groves, and gardens.

At present all this existed only in his thoughts. He used to write, in one of his numerous blank-books, minute plans for various parts of the grounds, still rough with the primeval stumps. A most unlawyer-like tone breathes through these written musings. What spell was upon him, when, in dreaming of a future cemetery, he could begin his entry with a sentence like this? "Choose out for a burial-place some unfrequented vale in the park, where is 'no sound to break the stillness but a brook, that, bubbling, winds among

taste.

the weeds; no mark of any human shape that had been there, unless the skeleton of some poor wretch who sought that place out to despair and die in.'" The rest of the description is in a similar The park, in general, was to be a grassy expanse, adorned with every fragrant shrub, with trees and groves, and it was to be the haunt of every animal and bird pleasing to man. "Court them to it by laying food for them in proper places. Procure a buck-elk to be, as it were, monarch of the wood; but keep him shy, that his appearance may not lose its effect by too much familiarity. A buffalo might be confined also. Inscriptions in various places, on the bark of trees or metal plates, suited to the character and expression of the particular spot." Whence these broodings over the mountain nest that was forming under his eye? Could it be love? Seven years before, he had solemnly assured John Page, that, if Belinda would not accept his service, it should never be offered to another.

But the mightiest capacity which this man possessed was the capacity to love. In every other quality and grace of human nature he has been often equalled, sometimes excelled; but where has there ever been a lover so tender, so warm, so constant, as he? Love was his life. Few men have had so many sources of pleasure, so many agreeable tastes and pursuits; but he knew no satisfying joy, at any period of his life, except through his affections. And there is none other for any of us. There is only one thing that makes it worth while to live: it is love. Not the wild passion that plagues us in our youth, but the tranquil happiness, the solid peace, to which that is but the tumultuous prelude, - the joy of living with people whose mere presence rests, cheers, improves, and satisfies us. He who achieves that needs no catechism to tell him what is the chief end of man. That is the chief end of man. Nothing else is of any account, except so far as it ministers to that. Jefferson was making this beautiful mountain nest for a mate whom he meant to ask to come and share it with him.

Among his associates at the Williamsburg bar was John Wayles, a lawyer in great practice, who had an estate near by, upon which he lived, called The Forest. He, too, had thriven upon the decline of Virginia; and he had invested his fees in lands and slaves, until, in 1771, he had a dozen farms and tracts in various parts of the Province, and four hundred slaves. At his home (which was not so

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