It is the usage here (and I suppose at all courts), that a minister resident shall establish his house in the first instant. If this is to be done out of his salary, he will be a twelvemonth, at least, without a copper to live on. It is the universal practice, therefore, of all nations to allow the outfit as a separate article from the salary. I have inquired here into the usual amount of it. I find that sometimes the sovereign pays the actual cost. This is particularly the case of the Sardinian ambassador now coming here, who is to provide a service of plate and every article of furniture and other matters of first expense, to be paid for by his court. In other instances, they give a service of plate, and a fixed sum for all other articles, which fixed sum is in no case lower than a year's salary. I desire no service of plate, having no ambition for splendor. My furniture, carriage, and apparel are all plain; yet they have cost me more than a year's salary. I suppose that in every country and every condition of life, a year's expense would be found a moderate measure for the furniture of a man's house. It is not more certain to me that the sun will rise to-morrow, than that our Government must allow the outfit, on their future appointment of foreign ministers; and it would be hard on me so to stand between the discontinuance of a former rule and the institution of a future one as to have the benefit of neither. In writing to Mr. Izard, who wrote to make some inquiries about a school for his son in France, he makes the following remarks about the education of boys: _To Mr. Izard._ I have never thought a boy should undertake abstruse or difficult sciences, such as mathematics in general, till fifteen years of age at soonest. Before that time they are best employed in learning the languages, which is merely a matter of memory. The languages are badly taught here. If you propose he should learn the Latin, perhaps you will prefer the having him taught it in America, and, of course, to retain him there two or three years more. One of the most beautiful traits in Jefferson's character was the tenderness of his love for a sister--Ann Scott Jefferson--who was deficient in intellect, and who, on that account, was more particularly the object of his brotherly love and attentions. The two following letters addressed to her husband and herself on the event of their marriage, while handsome and graceful letters in themselves, are more interesting and greater proofs of the goodness of his heart and the sincere warmth of his affections, from the simple character and nature of those to whom they were addressed. _To Mrs. Anna Scott Marks._ Paris, July 12th, 1788.