an hour in search of a bunch of redolent
violets to carry home to his wife. He pinned three on his coat.

V

When the 17th of June approached, Hamilton, John Jay, Chancellor
Livingston, and James Duane, started on horse for Poughkeepsie, not
daring, with Clinton on the spot, and the menace of an immediate
adjournment, to trust to the winds of the Hudson. General Schuyler had
promised to leave even a day sooner from the North, and the majority of
Federal delegates had gone by packet-boat, or horse, in good season.

The old post road between New York and Albany was, for the greater part
of the way, but a rough belt through a virgin forest. Occasionally a
farmer had cleared a few acres, the lawns of a manor house were open to
the sun, the road was varied by the majesty of Hudson and palisade for a
brief while, or by the precipitous walls of mountains, so thickly wooded
that even the wind barely fluttered their sombre depths. Man was a
moving arsenal in those long and lonely journeys, for the bear and the
panther were breeding undisturbed. But the month was hot, and those
forest depths were very cool; the scenery was often as magnificent as
primeval, and a generous hospitality at many a board dispelled, for an
interval, the political anxiety of Hamilton and his companions.

Hamilton, despite a mind trained to the subordination of private
interests to public duty, knew that it was the crisis of his own destiny
toward which he was hastening. He had bound up his personal ambitions
with the principles of the Federalist party--so called since the
publication in book form of the Publius essays; for not only was he
largely responsible for those principles, but his mind was too well
regulated to consider the alternative of a compromise with a possibly
victorious party which he detested. Perhaps his ambition was too
vaulting to adapt itself to a restricted field when his imagination had
played for years with the big ninepins of history; at all events, it was
inseparably bound up with nationalism in the boldest sense achievable,
and with methods which days and nights of severe thought had convinced
him were for the greatest good of the American people. Union meant
Washington in the supreme command, himself with the reins of government
in both hands. The financial, the foreign, the domestic policy of a
harmonious federation were as familiar to his mind as they are to us
to-day. Only he could achieve them, and only New York could