Whether, as Tucker thought, Jefferson selected a Greek quotation so as not to make any display of his feelings to the casual passer-by, or whether Greek had so really become his own habit of thought that he could not think of any better way to express his grief, is a matter of conjecture. He was not the man to speak of himself and his sorrows, even to his closest friends. But it was probably at this time that he wrote these lines found after his death in his pocketbook: "There is a time in human suffering when exceeding sorrows are but like snow falling on an iceberg", and in Latin, "_Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse._" At thirty-nine he was left a widower with a house full of children. Martha, born in 1772, Mary born in 1778, Lucy Elizabeth, the baby just born, who was to die two years later, and in addition the children of his friend and brother-in-law Carr, whom he had adopted at the death of their father. As soon as he had recovered from the first shock, Jefferson went with the children to the house of Colonel Archibald Cary, at Ampthill, in Chesterfield County, where he had them inoculated for the smallpox. "While engaged as their chief nurse on the occasion, he received notice of his appointment by Congress as Plenipotentiary to Europe, to be associated with Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams in negotiating peace (November 13,1782)."[88] He was just emerging from the stupor of mind which had rendered him "as dead to the world as she whose loss occasioned it."[89] It appeared to him that "public interest and the state of his mind concurred in recommending the change of scene proposed; and he accepted the appointment."[90] The next three months were spent in preparing for the journey. He made arrangements for his children and wrote a very touching letter to Washington, evincing once more that reluctance to express affectionate feeling so often found in Americans, a result of early education and training as much as of the national temperament: "Were I to indulge myself in those warm effusions which this subject forever prompts, they would wear an appearance of adulation very foreign to my nature; for such is the prostitution of language, that sincerity has no longer distinct terms in which to express her own truths."[91]