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On one day of that idle summer, as Mrs. Tucker rode through the plantations with little John up behind her, she called his attention to the broad acres which stretched around them, and cautioned him, when he was a man, never to sell his land. The admonition sank deep into his soul. An cestral pride and love of his paternal inheri tance became two of his strongest traits. To benefit his delicate health, John was taken, in 1784, from Maury's school in Williamsburg, to visit Mr. Tucker's rela tives in Bermuda. He remained in the islands for more than a year, and is next found in his fifteenth year at the grammar school at Princeton, and afterwards at Col umbia College, New York. He seems to have been ardent in the pursuit of such knowledge ^s he liked, and a constant reader of poetry and fiction-. The death of his beautiful mother in 1788, while John was at Princeton, was his first great sorrow. " She only understood me," he was wont to say, and he never ceased to mourn the love which might have cheered the despondency and softened the asperities of his later years. His regular studies came to an end before he was six teen, and he constantly regretted his lack of classical learning, and what he styled his "ignorance." Writing to a young friend in 182 1, he said, "We all have two educa tions; one we have given us, the other we give ourselves." His self-training and de velopment were on the lines most congenial to his tastes. Randolph was allied by blood and friend ship to the Masons, the Lees, the Nelsons, the Pages, to Jefferson, Henry and others who did much towards shaping the destinies of Virginia and of the United States. From babyhood, he had heard discussed the deep questions of civil and individual liberty, and the principles which are the foundation of free government. This turned his mind to ponder on these things and gave the im petus to his after career.

The period between his mother's death, and his coming to man's estate was passed in New York, where he witnessed General Washington's first inauguration, and in Phila delphia in the household of his father's cousin, Edmund Randolph, the attorneygeneral. The bright-eyed Virginia lad was at the meeting of the First Federal Congress, when only thirteen members were present. One of these was Tudor Tucker from South Carolina, brother to his step-father. Later on, his uncle Theoderick Bland took his seat, as did others from Virginia and the other States. In the home of the attorneygeneral, his young kinsman drank in politi cal wisdom from the lips of the distinguished statesmen who were often there, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, Grayson, Bland, Tucker, and their colleagues. His sym pathies were, from the first, with those who opposed the Federal Constitution as giving too much power to the general government, and too little to the individual States. Speak ing to his constituents many years after wards, he claimed that in that early time he — like Mason and Henry, "saw the poison under the wings " of the Constitution. None but the framers of that wonderful document then knew how, in its most important pro visions, it was the creature of compromise. The friends of Randolph's leisure hours were young Southerners of wealth, education and refinement, who, like himself, were in Philadelphia for further training and experi ence. Many of these were engaged in the study of medicine, not so much to make it their profession, as to fit themselves to min ister to the ailments of the slaves on their large and isolated plantations. Some of the attachments then formed lasted through out Randolph's life, especially his devotion to Joseph Bryan of Georgia. Returning to Virginia when he came of age, John Randolph took possession of his patrimonial estates on the Roanoke river, though he resided at his brother Richard's