Dreadful as some of them were, they could not be sent away hungry. Food that should have been sent to market to provide money for the family expenses, these visitors ate and ate like locusts. Patsy rebelled at using the beautiful Chippendale table that had been given Jefferson by his old friend and teacher, George Wythe of Williamsburg. So trestle tables were set up in the warming kitchens in the basement and picnic hampers passed about by servants on the lawn on fine days. A few important and genteel groups were dined in the big dining room, but there were often too many of those. All those letters that her father wrote, she thought impatiently, probably half of them were invitations to people in Philadelphia or Washington or New York to come to Monticello for long visits. “Where shall I sleep thirty-one people?” she worried, on a July night. “And, Papa, we had better plan on having a lot more linen woven right away. The woman washed fifty sheets yesterday. They’ll wear out fast at that rate.” Jefferson sighed. “I came home to find peace and there is no peace. What have I done in my past, my dear, that such hordes of admirers should descend upon me? I’ve been a very ordinary fellow. I’ve always been homely, ungainly, entirely unprepossessing. No one was more surprised than I when your mother agreed to marry me. There she was—a beautiful and gracious woman with a fortune of her own—and I a struggling young lawyer, a long-legged shide-poke of a fellow, freckled and coarse-maned as a lion, with no grace except that I could fiddle. And you know I was an unpopular president. The number of them that hated me was legion.” “Not the good plain people. Not these people who come up here in old carts or riding raw-boned nags just to get a glimpse of Thomas Jefferson, champion of the people,” his daughter said. “Two words of yours will never die in their ears: ‘Free and Equal.’ And because you made them feel free and equal, they come to see you—in droves!” “I haven’t slept in my own bed all summer,” complained Ann, the oldest daughter. “I’ve slept on hard pallets laid down on the floor till all my bones are worn raw.” “The worst is the curious women—the young ones,” said Ellen. “They open our wardrobes and finger our clothes. They even open drawers and jewel boxes. We should have locks on everything, Grandfather. One girl from away down on the Eastern Shore asked me to give her my chip-straw bonnet. The one Mrs. Adams sent me last summer. She said we were all rich and her folks were terribly poor and she hadn’t a decent bonnet to get married in because they were fishermen and the run of shad had been bad this year.” “You could have given her the bonnet, Ellen. I would have bought you another one,” said her grandfather. And gone in debt for it, thought his daughter, with a tinge of exasperation—when he had so many debts already!