What information he gave about his father has to be completed from other sources. The tradition in the family was that "the first paternal ancestor came from Wales, and from near the mountain of Snowdon, the highest in Great Britain." Peter Jefferson, landowner, practical surveyor, of gigantic stature and strength, had the sturdy qualities and ambition of the pioneer. He received a colonelcy in the militia, became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1755, and in 1749 had been chosen with Joshua Fry, professor of mathematics in William and Mary College, to continue the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. "He was afterwards employed with the same Mr. Fry to make the first map of Virginia which was ever made." Besides his association with Fry, from whom he drew the theoretical knowledge of mathematics in which he was lacking, Peter Jefferson improved himself by much reading, not novels, but the serious and sound books which constituted the ordinary family library in colonial Virginia,--historians, essayists, and most of all Shakespeare. For in Virginia as well as in New England, Shakespeare and the Bible were the two books found in every household, the two richest springs of the modern English language. Religion took up as much of their life as in New England. Prayers were said three and sometimes four times a day, and from his earliest infancy, Jefferson became familiar with the liturgy of the Church of England, and had stamped in his memory the strong old words, vigorous phrases and noble speech of King James' version. He was only five years old when his father, already planning to give him the education of which he himself had been deprived, decided to send the boy to the best school in the neighborhood. He stayed two years at the English school; then, when nine, he went to the school of Mr. Douglas, a Scotch clergyman, who taught him French and the rudiments of Latin and Greek. Most of his childhood was spent away from home, as a boarding student, and the silence maintained by Jefferson with reference to his parents is thus easily explained. It explains also the lack of spontaneity and the awkwardness which always prevented him from expressing freely his emotions and sentiments. What may seem in him a national characteristic was largely a matter of training and early discipline. He was fourteen when his father died, with a last recommendation that his son be given a classical education. Still a mere boy, Thomas Jefferson had become the oldest living male of the family and to a certain extent its head. Whether he was at first fully aware of his new responsibility is very doubtful. He could not remember without a retrospective fear in his later years how close he had come to wasting his whole life: