“I never spoil children. I teach them to use their eyes and their minds,” he protested, grunting as Burwell eased off the tight polished slippers and put shabby old carpet slippers on his feet. “There’s one thing I determine, Madam. If you can throw away stays when you are back at Monticello, I shall discard all fancy boots and slippers, stocks and tight cravats, and those confounded, silly lacy affairs down my front. You haven’t given away my good green breeches, I hope?” “Everything of yours is exactly as you left it, Papa. The moths got at that awful old homespun coat but I suppose you’ll wear it anyway.” “It comforts my old shoulders and the pockets are all in the right places,” he asserted. “Very likely full of rocks and arrowheads and dried leaves and dead butterflies at this moment.” She bent and kissed him, her fancy headdress slipping a little. She pulled it off freeing reddish brown curls to fall over her ears. “I’m going to bed myself. Those fiddles and trombones can squawk all night but they won’t keep me awake.” Left alone, Thomas Jefferson dug a comfortable hollow in his pillow and tried to sleep. But too much went coursing through his mind. That resolution passed by the Virginia Assembly, especially the words at the end: “You carry with you the sweetest of awards, the recollection of a life well spent in the service of your country.” That sentiment assuaged a little some of the bitterer things. Young Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s handsome protégé and Thomas Jefferson’s relentless enemy, dying, after he had fired dramatically in the air, from the bullet of Aaron Burr. And there had been Burr, as Jefferson knew, always plotting, dreaming up his grandiose schemes to set up an empire of his own in the West, fleeing to England when his treasonable activities were discovered, forfeiting his bail. John Marshall had been to blame for that. John Marshall, John Adams’ midnight appointee, named for petty spite, and the sworn and bitter enemy of Thomas Jefferson, had so muddled Burr’s trial that a jury had acquitted the man of treason and altered the charge to some trivial misdemeanor. And then Marshall had had the effrontery to subpoena the President of the United States as a witness! These are they who had worked all manner of evil against me, the words ran through the old man’s tired brain. Yet do I stand and my arm prevails against them. Curious how darkness and silence always brought back to him some line or other from the thousands of books he had read. That was something he would do at Monticello to fill up his days—catalogue all his books, almost ten thousand of them there must be now, for he had sent home boxes full every year. He would teach his older grandsons, Jefferson Randolph and Francis Eppes, to appreciate books too, and some of the girls might show some signs of possessing an eager mind like his Patsy’s.