Into Benton's home quite naturally there drifted, in the year 1840, a young lieutenant of the corps of topographical engineers, fresh from the survey of the upper Mississippi. The son of a French father and a Virginia mother, John C. Frémont was born in South Carolina, in the year 1813. He was graduated, when he was seventeen years old, from Charleston College, where he remained to study civil engineering and teach mathematics. He was so unusually talented that Poinsett, the Secretary of War, recommended his services to Nicollet when the latter was about to undertake the survey of the Upper Mississippi. The two years in the field were followed by two years spent in Washington in preparing the scientific result of the expedition, during which period Benton became interested more perhaps in the work than in the individuality of the young officer, whose genius was later to open to us the western gates of our republic. Accompanying Benton's eldest daughter to a concert at Miss English's school, Frémont for the first time met Jessie Benton. She produced on his mind at once "the effect that a rose of rare color or a beautiful picture would have done." She was but sixteen years old at the time, in the first bloom of girlish beauty, and her bright mind exhilarated by the pleasure of seeing her sister, poured itself forth in language as sparkling as it was natural. "Her beauty," he wrote later, in describing that first impression of her, "had come far enough down from English ancestry to be now in her that American kind which is made up largely of mind expressed in the face, but it still showed its Saxon descent. At that time of awakening mind, the qualities that made hers could only be seen in flitting shadows across the face or in the expression of incipient thought or unused and untried feeling." Coming home for the Easter holidays, she found that the young lieutenant had become identified with her father's "Oregon work." He was an almost daily visitor at her home, and in his constant meetings with her in its unreserved atmosphere he found confirmation of the first impression he had formed of her. "There are features," he wrote later, "that convey to us a soul so white that they impress with instant pleasure, and of this kind were hers. Her qualities were all womanly, and education had curiously preserved the down of a modesty which was innate. There had been no experience of life to brush away the bloom." Before the holidays were over this impression of her had penetrated Frémont's entire being, and he loved her no less profoundly than he admired her, rendering her an absolute devotion that knew no subsequent diminution. "Insensibly and imperceptibly," he said, "there came a glow into my heart which changed the current and color of daily life, and gave a beauty to common things."