end you what you need. I like your spirit." He
looked at his watch. "I have to dine at the Eagle with the Governor and
Mr. Randolph. When do you return to Albemarle?"
"To-morrow, sir."
"Then I may overtake you on the road. Once I did your father a good
turn, and I shall be glad to have a word with him now. He must not keep
the son of Mary Wayne in the fields. Some day I will ride down the
Three-Notched Road, and examine you on old Coke. Don't spare study; if
you will be a lawyer, become a good one, not a smatterer. Good-day to
you!"
He left the shop. The bookseller gazed after him, then nodded and smiled
at the boy. "You look transfigured, my lad! Well, he's a great man, and
he'll be a greater one yet. He's for the people, and one day the people
will be for him! I'll tie up your books--and if you can make a friend of
Mr. Jefferson, you do it!"
Lewis Rand came out into the sunlight with "old Coke" and Locke,
Plutarch and Ossian, under his arm, and in his soul I know not what
ardour of hero-worship, what surging resolve and aspiration. Young
Mocket, at his elbow, regarded him with something like awe. "That was
Mr. Jefferson," he said. "He knows General Washington and Marquis
Lafayette and Doctor Franklin. He's just home from Paris, and they have
made him Secretary of State--whatever that is. He wrote the Declaration
of Independence. He's a rich man--he's a lawyer, too. He lives at a
place named Monticello."
"I know," said Lewis Rand, "I've been to Monticello. When I am a man I
am going to have a house like it, with a terrace and white pillars and a
library. But I shall have a flower garden like the one at Fontenoy."
"Ho! your house! Is Fontenoy where Ludwell Cary lives?"
"No; he lives at Greenwood. The Churchills live at Fontenoy.--Now we'll
go see the Guard turn out. Is that the apple-woman yonder? I've a
half-a-bit left."
An hour later, having bought the apples, and seen the pillared Capitol,
and respectfully considered the outside of Chancellor Wythe's law
office, and having parted until the afternoon with Tom Mocket, who
professed an engagement on the Barbadoes brig, young Lewis Rand betook
himself to the Bird in Hand. There in the bare, not over clean chamber
which had been assigned to the party from Albemarle, he deposited his
precious parcel first in the depths of an ancient pair of saddle-bags,
then, thinking better of it, underneath the straw mattress of a small
bed. It was probable, he knew, th
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