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It was a most happy mating–all their quarreling had been done before marriage. The fine intellect and high spirit of Jefferson found their mate. She was his comrade and helpmeet as well as his wife. He could read his favorite Ossian aloud to her, and when he tired she would read to him; and all his plans and ambitions and hopes were hers. In laying out the grounds and beautifying that home on Monticello mountain, she took much more than a passive interest. It was “Our Home,” and to make it a home in very sooth for her beloved husband was her highest ambition. She knew the greatness of her mate, and all the dreams she had for his advancement were to come true. With her, ideality was to become reality. But she was to see it only in part.

Yet she had seen her husband re-elected to the Virginia Legislature; sent as a member to the Colonial Congress at Philadelphia, there to write the best known of all American literary productions; from their mountain home she had seen British troops march into Charlottesville, four miles away, and then, with household treasure, had fled, knowing that beautiful Monticello would be devastated by the enemy’s ruthless tread. She had known Washington, and had visited his lonely wife there at Mount Vernon when victory hung in the balance; when defeat meant that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would be the first victims of a vengeful foe. She saw her husband War-Governor of Virginia in its most perilous hour; she lived to know that Washington had won; that Cornwallis was his “guest,” and that no man, save Washington alone, was more honored in proud Virginia than her beloved lord and husband. She saw a messenger on horseback approach bearing a packet from the Congress at Philadelphia to the effect that “His Excellency, the Honorable Thomas Jefferson,” had been appointed as one of an embassy to France in the interests of the United States, with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane as colleagues, and, knowing her husband’s love for Franklin, and his respect for France, she leaned over his chair and with misty eyes saw him write his simple “No,” and knew that the only reason he declined was because he would not leave his wife at a time when she might most need his tenderness and sympathy.

And then they retired to beloved Monticello to enjoy the rest that comes only after work well done–to spend the long vacation of their lives in simple homekeeping work and studious leisure, her husband yet in manhood’s prime, scarce thirty-seven, as men count time, and rich, passing rich, in goods and lands.

And then she died.

And Thomas Jefferson, the strong, the self-poised, the self-reliant, fell in a helpless swoon, and was laid on a pallet and carried out, as though he, too, were dead. For three weeks his dazed senses prayed for death. He could endure the presence of no one save his eldest daughter, a slim, slender girl of scarce ten years, grown a woman in a day. By her loving touch and tenderness he was lured back from death and reason’s night into the world of life and light. With tottering steps, led by the child who had to think for both, he was taken out on the veranda of beautiful Monticello. He looked out on stretching miles of dark-blue hills and waving woods and winding river. He gazed, and as he looked it came slowly to him that the earth was still as when he last saw it, and realized that this would be so even if he were gone. Then, turning to the child, who stood by, stroking his locks, it came to him that even in grief there may be selfishness, and for the first time he responded to the tender caress, saying, “Yes, we will live, daughter–live in memory of her!”

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