Page:The Ladies of the White House.djvu/171

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JULY 4TH, 1826.
149

the practical part than myself, it is with her aid and that of one of her élèves, that I shall subjoin a catalogue of the books for such a course of reading as we have practised."

Again, in a letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, he says:

"You kindly encourage me to keep up my spirits; but oppressed with disease, debility, age and embarrassed affairs, this is difficult. For myself, I should not regard a prostration of fortune; but I am overwhelmed at the prospect of the situation in which I may leave my family. My dear and beloved daughter, the cherished companion of my early life, and nurse of my age, and her children, rendered as dear to me as if my own, from having lived with me from their cradle, left in a comfortless situation, hold up to me nothing but future gloom; and I should not care were life to end with the line I am writing, were it not that in the unhappy state of mind which your father's misfortunes have brought upon him, I may yet be of some avail to the family."

Ex-President Jefferson died the 4th of July, 1826, and at nearly the same hour passed away the spirit of John Adams. He lingered a little behind Jefferson, and his last words, uttered in the failing: articulation of the dying, were: "Jefferson still survives." Mrs. Randolph left no written account of the scene. On the 2d of July, Mr. Jefferson handed her a little casket. On opening it, after his death, she found a paper on which he had written the lines of Moore, commencing—