“I have had with me for a fortnight a little daughter of Mr. Jefferson’s, who arrived here with a young negro girl, her servant, from Virginia. Mr. Jefferson wrote me some months ago that he expected them, and desired me to receive them. I did so, and was amply rewarded for my trouble. A finer child of her age I never saw. So mature an understanding, so womanly a behavior, and so much sensibility, united, are rarely to be met with. I grew so fond of her, and she was so attached to me, that when Mr. Jefferson sent for her, they were obliged to force the little creature away. She is but eight years old. She would sit, sometimes, and describe to me the parting with her aunt, who brought her up,[6] the obligations she was under to her, and the love she had for her little cousins, till the tears would stream down her cheeks; and how I had been her friend, and she loved me. Her papa would break her heart by making her go again. She clung round me so that I could not help shedding a tear at parting with her. She was the favorite of every one in the house. I regret that such fine spirits must be spent in the walls of a convent. She is a beautiful girl, too.” Footnote 6: Mrs. Francis Eppes, of Eppington, Va. Marie (for so we shall henceforth call her, unless when adopting her father’s sobriquet of Polly) was soon placed with Martha in the school of the Abbaye de Panthemont. Martha had now grown into a tall, graceful girl, with that calm, sweet face, stamped with thought and earnestness, which, with the traces of many more years on it, and the noble dignity of the matron superadded, beams down from the speaking canvas of Sully. The most dutiful of daughters, the most attentive of learners, possessing a solid understanding, a judgment ripe beyond her years, a most gentle and genial temper, and an unassuming modesty of demeanor, which neither the distinction of her position, nor the flatteries that afterward surrounded her, ever wore off in the least degree, she was the idol of her father and family, and the delight of all who knew her. The little Marie has been sufficiently described by Mrs. Adams. “Slighter in person than her sister, she already gave indications of a superior beauty. It was that exquisite beauty possessed by her mother—that beauty which the experienced learn to look upon with dread, because it betrays a physical organization too delicately fine to withstand the rough shocks of the world.”