ill worse merchant, it is not easy to divine by
what subtle process of reasoning he had been able to conclude that
there would be any improvement in his circumstances by getting out of
agriculture and back into merchandise.

When he undertook this last venture he was still but a youth of
twenty. By the time that he was twenty-three, that is, by the autumn
of 1759, he had become convinced that his little store was to prove
for him merely a consumer of capital and a producer of bad debts; and
in view of the necessity of soon closing it, he had ample excuse for
taking into consideration what he should do next. Already was he the
happy father of sundry small children, with the most trustworthy
prospect of a steady enlargement and multiplication of his paternal
honors. Surely, to a man of twenty-three, a husband and a father, who,
from the age of fifteen, had been engaged in a series of enterprises
to gain his livelihood, and had perfectly failed in every one of them,
the question of his future means of subsistence must have presented
itself as a subject of no little pertinence, not to say urgency.
However, at that time Patrick seems to have been a young fellow of
superabounding health and of inextinguishable spirits, and even in
that crisis of his life he was able to deal gayly with its problems.
In that very year, 1759, Thomas Jefferson, then a lad of sixteen, and
on his way to the College of William and Mary, happened to spend the
Christmas holidays at the house of Colonel Nathan Dandridge, in
Hanover, and there first met Patrick Henry. Long afterward, recalling
these days, Jefferson furnished this picture of him:--

"Mr. Henry had, a little before, broken up his store, or
rather it had broken him up; but his misfortunes were not to
be traced either in his countenance or conduct." "During the
festivity of the season I met him in society every day, and
we became well acquainted, although I was much his
junior.... His manners had something of coarseness in them.
His passion was music, dancing, and pleasantry. He excelled
in the last, and it attached every one to him."[4]

Shortly after Jefferson left those hilarious scenes for the somewhat
more restrained festivities of the little college at Williamsburg,
Patrick succeeded in settling in his own mind what he was going to do
next. He could not dig, so it seemed, neither could he traffic, but
perhaps he could talk. Why not get a livi