Page:The Ladies of the White House.djvu/152

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MARTHA JEFFERSON.

passive nature, swayed by every passing- breeze, but a loving, strong heart, a rare and gifted intellect, cultivated by solid educational advantages, experience, and the society of the greatest statesman and scholar of his, day. In the midst of all happiness, vouchsafed to humanity, she died; and her husband, faithful to her memory, devoted himself to their children, and lived and died her lonely-hearted mourner.

Martha Jefferson, after the death of her mother, was placed at school in Philadelphia, at the age of eleven years, where she remained until her father took her, in 1784, to Europe. His other two daughters, being too young for such a journey, were left with their maternal aunt, Mrs. Eppes, wife of Francis Eppes; Esquire, of Eppington, Chesterfield County, Virginia. Mary, the second of his surviving children, was six years old, and Lucy Elizabeth, the third, was two years old. The latter died before the close of 1784. The child of sorrow and misfortune, her organization was too frail and too intensely susceptible to last long. Her sensibilities were so precociously acute, that she listened with exquisite pleasure to music, and wept on hearing a false note.

After a short period of sight-seeing, Martha Jefferson was placed at a convent, and continued to reside there during her father's stay in Europe. In July, 1787, "the long-expected Mary (called Marie in France, and thenceforth through life, Marie) reached London." She had crossed the Adandc with simply a servant girl, though doubtless they were both intrusted to the charge