A letter written by Mr. Jefferson to his overseer had been the means of the negroes getting information of their master's return home some days before he arrived. They were wild with joy, and requested to have holiday on the day on which he was expected to reach home. Their request was, of course, granted, and they accordingly assembled at Monticello from Mr. Jefferson's different farms. The old and the young came--women and children--and, growing impatient, they sauntered down the mountain-side and down the road until they met the carriage-and-four at Shadwell, when the welkin rang with their shouts of welcome. Martha Jefferson speaks of their "almost" drawing the carriage by hand up the mountain: her memory in this instance may have failed her, for I have had it from the lips of old family servants who were present as children on the occasion, that the horses were actually "unhitched," and the vehicle drawn by the strong black arms up to the foot of the lawn in front of the door at Monticello. The appearance of the young ladies, before whom they fell back and left the way clear for them to reach the house, filled them with admiration. They had left them when scarcely more than children in the arms, and now returned--Martha a tall and stately-looking girl of seventeen years, and the little Maria, now in her eleventh year, more beautiful and, if possible, more lovable than when, two years before, her beauty and her loveliness had warmed into enthusiasm the reserved but kind-hearted Mrs. Adams. The father and his two daughters were then at last once more domiciled within the walls of their loved Monticello. How grateful it would have been for him never again to have been called away from home to occupy a public post, the following extract from a letter written by him before leaving Paris will show. He writes to Madison: You ask me if I would accept any appointment on that side of the water? You know the circumstances which led me from retirement, step by step, and from one nomination to another, up to the present. My object is to return to the same retirement. Whenever, therefore, I quit the present, it will not be to engage in any other office, and most especially any one which would require a constant residence from home. CHAPTER IX. Letters on the French Revolution. I have thought it best to throw into one chapter the extracts from Mr. Jefferson's Letters and Memoir which relate to the scenes that he witnessed at the beginning of the Revolution. These are so interesting as almost to make us regret, with himself, that he should have been recalled from France at that most fearfully interesting period of her history. What pictures his pen would have preserved to us of scenes, of many of which he would have been an eye-witness, and how the student of history would revel in his dispatches home, which, like those he has left us, must have abounded in interesting details and sketches of character!