Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. I.djvu/144

 112 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS of their county. He inherited also his father s inclination to liberal politics, his taste for litera ture, and his aptitude for mathematics. Peter Jefferson died in 1757, when his son Thomas was fourteen years of age. On his death-bed he left an injunction that the education of his son, already well advanced in a preparatory school, should be completed at the College of William and Mary, a circumstance which his son always remembered with gratitude, saying that, if he had to choose between the education and the estate his father left him, he would choose the education. His schoolmates re ported that at school he was noted for good scholar ship, industry, and shyness. Without leaving his father s land he could shoot turkeys, deer, foxes, and other game. His father in his last hours had specially charged his mother not to permit him to neglect the exercise requisite for health and strength; but the admonition was scarcely neces sary, for the youth was a keen hunter and had been taught by his father to swim his horse over the Rivanna, a tributary of the James, which flowed by the estate. The Jeffersons were a musical family; the girls sang the songs of the time, and Thomas, practising the violin assiduously from boyhood, became an excellent performer. At seventeen, when he entered the College of William and Mary, he was tall, raw-boned, freckled, and sandy-haired, with