t old colonial plantation home which has become the shrine
of many a pilgrimage. Contrasting it as there it stands to-day with the
marble halls which we have left behind us, we realize the truth of
Emerson: "The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grandeur
which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet opens to every
wretch that has reason the doors of the Universe."

The quaint old wooden mansion, with the stately but simple old-fashioned
mahogany furniture, real and ungarnished; the swords and relics of
campaigns and scenes familiar to every schoolboy now; the key of the
Bastile hanging in the hall incased in glass, calling to mind Tom
Paine's happy expression, "That the principles of the American
Revolution opened the Bastile is not to be doubted, therefore the key
comes to the right place;" the black velvet coat worn when the farewell
address to the Army was made; the rooms all in nicety of preparation as
if expectant of the coming host--we move among these memorials of days
and men long vanished--we stand under the great trees and watch the
solemn river, in its never-ceasing flow, we gaze upon the simple tomb
whose silence is unbroken save by the low murmur of the waters or the
wild bird's note, and we are enveloped in an atmosphere of moral
grandeur which no pageantry of moving men nor splendid pile can
generate. Nightly on the plain of Marathon--the Greeks have the
tradition--there may yet be heard the neighing of chargers and the
rushing shadows of spectral war. In the spell that broods over the
sacred groves of Vernon, Patriotism, Honor, Courage, Justice, Virtue,
Truth seem bodied forth, the only imperishable realities of man's being.

There emerges from the shades the figure of a youth over whose cradle
had hovered no star of destiny, nor dandled a royal crown--an ingenious
youth, and one who in his early days gave auguries of great powers. The
boy whose strong arm could fling a stone across the Rappahannock; whose
strong will could tame the most fiery horse; whose just spirit made him
the umpire of his fellows; whose obedient heart bowed to a mother's
yearning for her son and laid down the midshipman's warrant in the
British Navy which answered his first ambitious dream; the student
transcribing mathematical problems, accounts, and business forms, or
listening to the soldiers and seamen of vessels in the river as they
tell of "hair-breadth 'scapes by flood and field;" the early moralist in
his