Mrs. Randolph was “the apple of her father’s eye.” All his letters bear witness to his affection, and all his life records this prominent sentiment of his heart. A gentleman writing to him for his views on a proper course of education for woman, he takes the opportunity of complimenting her unconsciously. “A plan of female education,” he says, “has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me. It has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters occasionally required. Considering that they would be placed in a country situation where little aid could be obtained from abroad, I thought it essential to give them a solid education, which might enable them—when become mothers—to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be lost, or incapable, or inattentive. “My surviving daughter accordingly, the mother of many daughters as well as sons, has made their education the object of her life, and being a better judge of the practical part than myself, it is with her aid and that of one of her _élèves_, that I shall subjoin a catalogue of the books for such a course of reading as we have practised.” Again, in a letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, he says: “You kindly encourage me to keep up my spirits; but oppressed with disease, debility, age and embarrassed affairs, this is difficult. For myself, I should not regard a prostration of fortune; but I am overwhelmed at the prospect of the situation in which I may leave my family. My dear and beloved daughter, the cherished companion of my early life, and nurse of my age, and her children, rendered as dear to me as if my own, from having lived with me from their cradle, left in a comfortless situation, hold up to me nothing but future gloom; and I should not care were life to end with the line I am writing, were it not that in the unhappy state of mind which your father’s misfortunes have brought upon him, I may yet be of some avail to the family.” Ex-President Jefferson died the 4th of July, 1826, and at nearly the same hour passed away the spirit of John Adams. He lingered a little behind Jefferson, and his last words, uttered in the failing articulation of the dying, were: “Jefferson still survives.” Mrs. Randolph left no written account of the scene. On the 2d of July, Mr. Jefferson handed her a little casket. On opening it, after his death, she found a paper on which he had written the lines of Moore, commencing— “It is not the tear at this moment shed When the cold turf has just been lain o’er him”— There is also a touching tribute to his daughter, declaring that while he “goes to his fathers,” “the last pang of life” is in parting from her; that “two seraphs” “long shrouded in death” (meaning doubtless his wife and younger daughter) “await him;” that he will “bear them her love.”