his seat on the bench and returned to the bar. He is a sensible man, and I should place confidence in what he says. Were it my business I should procure the information he asks and give him a moiety of the land if he will prosecute the claim at his own expense. I should have feared that the act of limitations was already a bar, but Mr. M.'s judgment may be relied on. Your mother's love to the family. I am, my dear son, Your affectionate father, J. Marshall. His dress was so simple and old-fashioned, and his manner so unaffected and plain, that a number of ludicrous mistakes occurred. One morning he went to call on a lady who had just married his brother, and who had never met him. She was expecting the butcher to call to look at a calf she wished to sell. When the servant told her a man wanted to see her at the door, the girl had not thought him worthy to enter the parlor, Mrs. Marshall, glancing around, also de ceived by his plain clothes, concluded he was the butcher and ordered him to be taken to the stable to see the calf. He laugh ingly explained who he was, and the lady, very much confused and mortified, hastily invited him in. He was devoted to farming, and under stood it thoroughly. He had a farm near Richmond where he spent much time, and he could discourse as learnedly on pasture and tillage, crops and stock, as on the law. A cousin told me he met him hurrying out to his farm one morning. He had a large jug resting on the pummel of his saddle, and, having lost the cork, was holding his thumb in it for a stopper. It was whiskey for his hands. He was so energetic, that he hated to be waited upon. This same cousin, the late Ur. Fisher of Virginia, met him one morning during the term of his court in Richmond, hurrying back home. As he passed he said : " I left my spectacles, and am going back for them." The young man insisted upon going for them for him, but
he emphatically declined, saying: "No, thank you, I will go myself." A nephew of his wife told me : " He called a day or two after the arrival of my self and bride in Richmond, with his usual promptness in extending courtesies to all. He made himself so agreeable that he com pletely won my wife's heart. A few days after he gave an elegant dinner in our honor, and drank this toast, standing, ' To all our sweethearts.'" In a letter to a friend John Randolph once said : " You are right to like the Chief Justice's madeira, for it is very fine." This wine was some he brought from France in 1798. It was carefully preserved in the family and used at the weddings of descen dants. After the war some of it was sold to buy bread for some members of the family. Some years ago, when I was visiting in Washington, a prominent and charming so ciety woman said to me : " Come to me, Miss Marshall, and I will give you some of your great-grandfather's famous madeira. But," she quickly added, " perhaps you do not like my having it, and I am sorry I mentioned it." " Indeed," I replied, " you are quite mistaken, I am glad you bought it, for the money was very necessary to some people very dear to me, and I will come, with pleasure, to taste it." So it came, by the fortunes of war, that I drank my great-grandfather's wine in a stranger's house. When absent from his wife, the Chief Jus tice wrote to her frequently, cheering her weary hours of pain with graphic and lively descriptions of the sayings and doings in the capital city. He always called his wife Polly. The following is part of a letter to Mrs. Mary W. Marshall, Richmond, Va. : — Washington, Feb., 1829. Our sick judges have at length arrived and we are as busy as men can well be. I do not walk so far as I formerly did, but I still keep up the pastime of walking in the morn
