earth; and there, in Richmond, sat
on the chancellor's bench George Wythe, venerable with years and
honors, one of the grand old men of Old Virginia, the preceptor of
Jefferson, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the most learned
man in his profession, and one of the best men of any profession. Who
could have foreseen that this friendless orphan, a Baptist preacher's
son, in a State where to be a "dissenter" was social inferiority,
should have found in this eminent judge a friend, a mentor, a patron,
a father?

Yet it came about in the most natural way. We catch our first glimpse
of the boy when he sat in a little log school-house, without windows
or floor, one of a humming score of shoeless boys, where a
good-natured, irritable, drinking English schoolmaster taught him to
read, write, and cipher as far as Practice. This was the only school
he ever attended, and that was all he learned at it. His widowed
mother, with her seven young children, her little farm, and two or
three slaves, could do no more for him. Next, we see him a tall,
awkward, slender stripling of thirteen, still barefoot, clad in
homespun butternut of his mother's making, tilling her fields, and
going to mill with his bag of corn strapped upon the family pony. At
fourteen, in the year 1791, a place was found for him in a Richmond
drug-store, where he served as errand-boy and youngest clerk for one
year.

Then occurred the event which decided his career. His mother having
married again, her husband had influence enough to procure for the lad
the place of copying clerk in the office of the Court of Chancery. The
young gentlemen then employed in the office of that court long
remembered the entrance among them of their new comrade. He was
fifteen at the time, but very tall for his age, very slender, very
awkward, and far from handsome. His good mother had arrayed him in a
full suit of pepper-and-salt "figginy," an old Virginia fabric of silk
and cotton. His shirt and shirt-collar were stiffly starched, and his
coat-tail stood out boldly behind him. The dandy law clerks of
metropolitan Richmond exchanged glances as this gawky figure entered,
and took his place at a desk to begin his work. There was something in
his manner which prevented their indulgence in the jests that usually
greet the arrival of a country youth among city blades; and they
afterwards congratulated one another that they had waited a little
before beginning to tease him, for the