“Violets and burnt paper,” remarked he. “’Tis a combination I have noticed before.  I wonder will some astute perfumer ever seize the idea?  It would have its guilty appeal for our sex—­perchance for t’other; though I’m no cynic like you and Morris.”

“Shut up,” said Hamilton, “and get to work if you love me, for I’ve no time to write to St. Croix, much less waste five seconds on any woman.”

That afternoon he wasted half 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 give him those reins of power.