to sprinkle coarse sand in their paint so as to give the woodwork the appearance of stone; and when he could find no one in Virginia competent to chisel the capitals of the marble columns he imported sculptors from Italy.

His thought and labor for this institution, and the obstacles he had to overcome in procuring the necessary funds, served to distract his thoughts in a measure from his own pecuniary embarrassments, which so embittered the closing years of his life.

Edward Bacon, his overseer, tells how the buildings for "Central College" were begun. In his reminiscences he says: "My instruction was to get ten able bodied hands to commence the work. I soon got them and Mr. Jefferson started from Monticello to lay off the foundation, and see the work commenced. An Irishman named Dinsmore and I went along with him. As we passed through Charlottesville, I went to old Davy Isaac's store, and got a ball of twine, and Dinsmore found some shingles and made some pegs, and we all went on to the old field together. Mr. Jefferson looked over the ground for some time and then stuck down a peg. He stuck the very first peg in that building, and then directed me where to carry the line, and I stuck the second. He carried one end of the line and I the other in laying off the foundation of the University. He had a little rule in his pocket that he always carried with him, and with this he measured off the ground, and laid off the entire foundation, and then set the men at work.

"After the foundation was nearly completed, they had a great time laying the corner stone. The old field was covered with carriages and people. There was an immense crowd there. Mr.

Monroe laid the corner stone. He was President at that time. Mr. Jefferson,-poor old man, I can see his white head just as he stood there and looked on. After this he rode there from Monticello every day while the University was building, unless the weather was very stormy. He looked after all the materials and would not allow any poor materials to go into the building if he could help it. He took as much pains in seeing that everything was done right as if it had been his own house."

Jefferson continued his personal supervision to the end of his days and kept the records of the institution with great detail, notwithstanding his age and an infirm wrist, which had been fractured. The last entry included the minutes of a meeting of the Board of Visitors only a few days before his death. For a man who wrote so much he was a marvellous penman. Every page is neat, every letter plainly and perfectly formed, so that his writing is as easy to read as print, and up to the last shows a firmness and regularity quite as marked as the pages he wrote in early manhood.

His original intention was to use in the buildings nothing but Virginia stone, but when he found that it was not adapted for fine carving he brought marble from Carrara. There is nothing to be seen, there is scarcely anything to be heard, and very few ideas can be suggested at the University of Virginia that did not spring from Jefferson's fertile and comprehensive mind. His architectural designs, however, were not original. Most of them were copied by his own hand or that of his granddaughter from a picture-book, "The Architecture of A. Palladio," well known to students in that branch of art. It contains engravings of classic models of the five orders

RESIDENCE OF A PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

(Designed by Thomas Jefferson)

of architecture, with "the most necessary observations," by Giacomo Leoni, a Venetian, and "Notes and Remarks of Inigo Jones, now first taken from his Original Manuscript in Worcester College Library, Oxford." Jefferson appears to have given the volume careful study for years, and reproduced among the buildings of the University those features of architecture among its illustrations which to his taste were the purest and most beautiful examples of the classic period, the theatre of Marcellus, the baths of Diocletian and Caracalla, the temple of Fortuna Virilis,-and for the central figure of the composition he reconstructed the Roman Pantheon, the temple of all the gods, reduced to one-third of its original size, but still majestic and imposing.

The curves of the dome, when extended to the ground, describe an exact circle, and in symmetry and simplicity he esteemed it the noblest expression of human construction. In selecting this model for the library Jefferson desired to keep constantly before the eyes of the students an objectlesson that would elevate their taste and appeal to the highest sense of the artistic.

These buildings are grouped around a quadrangle one thousand feet in length by five hundred feet in width, the library lifting its noble form at one end, and a group of new Ionic buildings at the other, erected recently to take the place of those which were destroyed by fire in 1895. The three sides of the quadrangle are lined with porticoes extending from the buildings twenty feet or more and sustained by rows of white pillars. They resemble the cloisters of an ancient monastery. The students occupy monkish cells, entered from the arcade and lighted from the rear, while at intervals the sameness is broken by a two-story