more than half a dozen on your side of the Potomac, and on this side, myself alone.  You and I have been wonderfully spared, and myself with remarkable health, and a considerable activity of body and mind.  I am on horseback three or four hours of every day; visit three or four times a year a possession I have ninety miles distant, performing the winter journey on horseback.  I walk little, however, a single mile being too much for me; and I live in the midst of my grandchildren, one of whom has lately promoted me to be a great-grandfather.  I have heard with pleasure that you also retain good health, and a greater power of exercise in walking than I do.  But I would rather have heard this from yourself, and that, writing a letter like mine, full of egotisms, and of details of your health, your habits, occupations, and enjoyments, I should have the pleasure of knowing, that in the race of life, you do not keep, in its physical decline, the same distance ahead of me, which you have done in political honors and achievements.  No circumstances have lessened the interest I feel in these particulars respecting yourself; none have suspended for one moment my sincere esteem for you, and I now salute you with unchanged affection and respect.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER C.—­TO JOHN ADAMS, April 20, 1812

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, April 20, 1812.

Dear Sir,

I have it now in my power to send you a piece of homespun in return for that I received from you.  Not of the fine texture, or delicate character of yours, or, to drop our metaphor, not filled as that was with that display of imagination which constitutes excellence in Belles Lettres, but a mere sober, dry, and formal piece of logic. Ornari res ipsa negat.  Yet you may have enough left of your old taste for law reading, to cast an eye over some of the questions it discusses.  At any rate, accept it as the offering of esteem and friendship.

You wish to know something of the Richmond and Wabash prophets.  Of Nimrod Hews I never before heard.  Christopher Macpherson I have known for twenty years.  He is a man of color, brought up as a book-keeper by a merchant, his master, and afterwards enfranchised.  He had understanding enough to post up his leger from his journal, but not enough to bear up against hypochrondriac affections, and the gloomy forebodings they inspire.  He became crazy, foggy, his head always in the clouds, and rhapsodizing what neither himself nor any one else could understand.  I think he told me he had visited you personally while you were in the administration, and wrote you letters, which you have probably forgotten in the mass of the correspondences of that crazy class, of whose complaints, and terrors, and mysticisms, the several Presidents have been the regular depositories.  Macpherson was too honest to be molested by any body, and too inoffensive to be a subject for the mad-house; although, I believe, we are told in the old book, that ’every man that is mad, and maketh himself a prophet, thou shouldst put him in prison and in the stocks.’