An anecdote which has been often told of him will give the reader an idea of the varied extent of his knowledge. On one occasion, while travelling, he stopped at a country inn. A stranger, who did not know who he was, entered into conversation with this plainly-dressed and unassuming traveller. He introduced one subject after another into the conversation, and found him perfectly acquainted with each. Filled with wonder, he seized the first opportunity to inquire of the landlord who his guest was, saying that, when he spoke of the law, he thought he was a lawyer; then turning the conversation on medicine, felt sure he was a physician; but having touched on theology, he became convinced that he was a clergyman. "Oh," replied the landlord, "why I thought you knew the Squire." The stranger was then astonished to hear that the traveller whom he had found so affable and simple in his manners was Jefferson. The family circle at Shadwell consisted of six sisters, two brothers, and their mother. Of the sisters, two married early, and left the home of their youth--Mary as the wife of Thomas Bolling, and Martha as that of the generous and highly-gifted young Dabney Carr, the brilliant promise of whose youth was so soon to be cut short by his untimely death. In the fall of the year 1765, the whole family was thrown into mourning, and the deepest distress, by the death of Jane Jefferson--so long the pride and ornament of her house. She died in the twenty-eighth year of her age. The eldest of her family, and a woman who, from the noble qualities of her head and heart, had ever commanded their love and admiration, her death was a great blow to them all, but was felt by none so keenly as by Jefferson himself. The loss of such a sister to such a brother was irreparable; his grief for her was deep and constant; and there are, perhaps, few incidents in the domestic details of history more beautiful than his devotion to her during her life, and the tenderness of the love with which he cherished her memory to the last days of his long and eventful career. He frequently spoke of her to his grandchildren, and even in his extreme old age said that often in church some sacred air which her sweet voice had made familiar to him in youth recalled to him sweet visions of this sister whom he had loved so well and buried so young. Among his manuscripts we find the following touching epitaph which he wrote for her: "Ah, Joanna, puellarum optima, Ah, ævi virentis flore prærepta, Sit tibi terra lævis; Longe, longeque valeto!" After the death of his sister Jane, Jefferson had no congenial intellectual companion left in the family at Shadwell; his other sisters being all much younger than himself, except one, who was rather deficient in intellect. It is curious to remark the unequal distribution of talent in this family--each gifted member seeming to have been made so at the expense of one of the others.