doers of them, that Mr. Jefferson most deeply impressed his listener.  For there was no attribute of Mr. Jefferson’s mind so keen, so unerring, so forceful as that peculiar power of divining the drift of the masses.  It was this power which later made him so greatly feared and greatly respected in his own land.  Forewarned and forearmed, he had but to range himself at the head of multitudes, whose will he knew almost before they were aware of it themselves, or else to stand aside, and, unscathed, let it pass him by in all its turbulence and strength.  But though he could foresee the trend of events, his judgment was not infallible as to their values and consequences.  Even as he spoke of the disquieting progress of affairs, even as he predicted the yet more serious turn they were to take, his countenance expressed a boundless, if somewhat vaguely defined, belief and happiness in the future.

The glow of enthusiasm was not at all reflected in the keen, attentive face of the younger man opposite him, whose look of growing disquietude betrayed the fact that he did not share Mr. Jefferson’s hopes or sympathies.  Indeed, it was inevitable that these two men of genius should hold dissimilar views about the struggle which the one had so clearly divined was to come and of which the other so clearly comprehended the consequences.  It was inevitable that the man who had the sublime audacity to proclaim unfettered liberty and equality to a new world should differ radically from the man whose supreme achievement had been the fashioning and welding of its laws.  They talked together until the wintry sun suddenly suffered an eclipse behind the mountains of gray clouds which had been threatening to fall upon it all the afternoon, and only the light from the crackling logs remained to show the bright enthusiasm of Mr. Jefferson’s noble face and the sombre shadow upon Mr. Morris’s disturbed one.

CHAPTER II

THE FRANCE OF 1789

France was sick.  A great change and fever had fallen upon her, and there was no physician near skilled enough to cure her.  Now and then one of her sons would look upon the pale, wasted features and note the rapidly throbbing pulse, the wild ravings of the disordered brain, and, frightened and despondent, would hurry away to consult with his brothers what should be done.  But never to any good.  Medicines were tried which had been potent with others in like sickness, but they seemed only to increase her delirium or lessen her vitality—­never to bring her strength and reason.  Day by day she grew worse.  ’Twas as if some quick poison were working in her veins, until at last the poor body was one mass of swollen disfigurements, of putrid sores, that only a miracle from Heaven could heal.  As miracles could not be looked for, everyone who had any skill in such desperate cases was called, and a thousand different opinions were given, a thousand different