He was opposed to ostentation. He used to quote the words of Cotton Mather to him when he was a boy. On leaving the minister's house, he hit his head against a beam. "'Stoop,' said Mather; 'you are young, and have the world before you; stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps!' This advice, thus beat into my head, has frequently been of use to me, and I often think of it when I see pride mortified, and misfortunes brought upon people by their carrying their heads too high." Tolerant with all religions, sweet-tempered, with remarkable tact and genuine kindness, honest, and above jealousy, he adopted this as his rule, which we may well follow: "To go straight forward in doing what appears to me to be right, leaving the consequences to Providence." [Illustration: Thomas Jefferson signature] THOMAS JEFFERSON. Five miles east of Charlottesville, Virginia, near where the River Rivanna enters the James, Thomas Jefferson was born, April 13, 1743, the third in a family of eight children. Peter Jefferson, his father, descended from a Welsh ancestry, was a self-made man. The son of a farmer, with little chance for schooling, he improved every opportunity to read, became, like George Washington, a surveyor, and endured cheerfully all the perils of that pioneer life. Often, in making his survey across the Blue Ridge Mountains, he was obliged to defend himself against the attacks of wild beasts, and to sleep in hollow trees. When the provisions gave out, and his companions fell fainting beside him, he subsisted on raw flesh, and stayed on until his work was completed. So strong was he physically that when two hogsheads of tobacco, each weighing a thousand pounds, were lying on their sides, he could raise them both upright at once. Besides this great strength of body, he developed great strength of mind. Shakespeare and Addison were his favorites. It was not strange that by and by he became a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. When Peter Jefferson was thirty-one, he married into a family much above his own socially--Jane, the daughter of Isham Randolph, a rich and cultured gentleman. She was but nineteen, of a most cheerful and hopeful temperament, with a passionate love of nature in every flower and tree. From these two the boy Thomas inherited the two elements that make a man's character beautiful, not less than a woman's--strength and sweetness. With his mother's nature, he found delight in every varying cloud, every rich sunset or sunrise, and in that ever new and ever wonderful change from new moon to full and from full to new again. How tender and responsive such a soul becomes! How it warms toward human nature from its love for the material world!