it is with pleasure I hear he enjoys good health, and is a fine, promising boy.”  He remained in France till 1792, when his mother’s anxiety for his safety overcame her desire for the completion of his studies, and she wrote to Gouverneur Morris, who was then in France, to send him home.  “Mr. Jefferson,” reads the autograph before me, “presents his most respectful compliments to Mrs. Greene, and will with great pleasure write to Mr. Morris on the subject of her son’s return, forwarding her letter at the same time.  He thinks Mrs. Greene concluded that he should return by the way of London.  If he is mistaken, she will be so good as to correct him, as his letter to Mr. Morris will otherwise be on that supposition.”  He returned a large, vigorous, athletic man, full of the scenes he had witnessed, and ready to engage in active life with the ardor of his age and the high hopes which his name authorized; for it was in the days of Washington and Hamilton and Knox, men who extended to the son the love they had borne to the father.  But his first winter was to be given to his home, to his mother and sisters; and there, while pursuing too eagerly his favorite sport of duck-shooting from a canoe on the Savannah, his boat was overset, and, though his companion escaped by clinging to the canoe, he was borne down by the weight of his accoutrements and drowned.  The next day the body was recovered, and the vault which but six years before had prematurely opened its doors to receive the remains of the father was opened again for the son.  Not long after, his family removed to Cumberland Island and ceased to look upon Savannah as their burial-place; and when, for the first time, after the lapse of more than thirty years, and at the approach of Lafayette on his last memorable visit to the United States, a people awoke from their lethargy and asked where the bones of the hero of the South had been laid, there was no one to point out their resting-place.  Happy, if what the poet tells us be true, and “still in our ashes live their wonted fires,” that they have long since mingled irrevocably with the soil of the land that he saved, and can never become associated with a movement that has been disgraced by the vile flag of Secession!

But to return to the Rue d’Anjou.  A loud noise in the street announced the approach of the Indians, whose appearance in an open carriage had drawn together a dense crowd of sight-loving Parisians; and in a few moments they entered, decked out in characteristic finery, but without any of that natural grace and dignity which I had been taught to look for in the natives of the forest.  The General received them with the dignified affability which was the distinctive characteristic of his manner under all circumstances; and although there was nothing in the occasion to justify it, I could not help recalling Madame de Stael’s comment upon his appearance at Versailles, on the fearful fifth of October:—­“M. de la Fayette was perfectly calm; nobody ever saw him otherwise.”