cello
is a monument to his almost Yankee-like ingenuity. He writes to his
friend Thomas Paine to assure him that the semi-cylindrical form of roof
after the De Lorme pattern, which he proposes for his house, is entirely
practicable, for he himself had "used it at home for a dome, being 120
degrees of an oblong octagon." He was characteristically American in
his receptivity to new ideas from any source. A chance item about Eli
Whitney of New Haven arrests his attention and forthwith he writes to
Madison recommending a "Mr. Whitney at Connecticut, a mechanic of the
first order of ingenuity, who invented the cotton gin," and who has
recently invented "molds and machines for making all the pieces of his
[musket] locks so exactly equal that take one hundred locks to pieces
and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well
by taking the first pieces which come to hand." To Robert Fulton,
then laboring to perfect his torpedoes and submarine, Jefferson wrote
encouragingly: "I have ever looked to the submarine boat as most to be
depended on for attaching them [i. e., torpedoes].... I am in hopes it
is not to be abandoned as impracticable."

It was not wholly affectation, therefore, when Jefferson wrote, "Nature
intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my
supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived,
have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself
on the boisterous ocean of political passions." One can readily picture
this Virginia farmer-philosopher ruefully closing his study door, taking
a last look over the gardens and fields of Monticello, in the golden
days of October, and mounting Wildair, his handsome thoroughbred,
setting out on the dusty road for that little political world at
Washington, where rumor so often got the better of reason and where
gossip was so likely to destroy philosophic serenity.

Jefferson had been a widower for many years; and so, since his daughters
were married and had households of their own, he was forced to preside
over his menage at Washington without the feminine touch and tact
so much needed at this American court. Perhaps it was this unhappy
circumstance quite as much as his dislike for ceremonies and formalities
that made Jefferson do away with the weekly levees of his predecessors
and appoint only two days, the First of January and the Fourth of July,
for public receptions. On such occasions he