To her daughter, Mrs. Virginia Jefferson Trist, I am indebted for tliis narrative of the closing eight years of Mrs. Randolph's life:
"My Dear Mrs. Holloway:
"I wish it were in my power to answer your inquiries more satisfactorily than I am able to do. My recollections of my mother, at so early a period of my life as the one referred to, are altogether childish and imperfect. It is true, my very earliest recollections are connected with a winter passed in the White House during my grandfather's Presidency, but they are so few and so scanty and childish, as they rise before me in the mists of long past years, that really nothing worth offering you suggests itself to my mind.
"My mother was born in September, 1772, and had therefore entered her 29th year when her father was elected President. She was then the mother of five children, having married at the early age of seventeen. Thus surrounded by a family of young children, she could not pass much of her time in Washington; she did, however, spend two winters there, the first in 1802–3. the second in 1805–6. Her health was very bad on the first of these two occasions of her visiting her father. Having an abscess on her lungs, she was advised by her physician to go to pass the winter in Bermuda, and for this purpose left her home in Albemarle, Virginia, to go as far as Washington in her travelling carriage—the only mode at that day of making the journey of four
