In August, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-four, we find him leaving his office in New York in charge of a clerk, and riding horseback over to the town of Elizabeth, there joining his father-in-law, and the two starting for Philadelphia.  On the road they fell in with John Adams, who kept a diary.  That night at the tavern where they stopped, the sharp-eyed Yankee recorded the fact of meeting these new friends and added, “Mr. Jay is a young gentleman of the law ... and Mr. Scott says a hard student and a very good speaker.”

And so they journeyed on across the State to Trenton and down the Delaware River to Philadelphia, visiting, and cautiously discussing great issues as they went.  Samuel Adams, too, was in the party, as reticent as Jay.  Jay was twenty-nine and Samuel Adams fifty-two years old, but they became good friends, and Samuel once quietly said to John Adams, “That man Jay is young in years, but he has an old head.”

Jay was the youngest man of the Convention, save one.

When the Second Congress met, Jay was again a delegate.  He served on several important committees, and drew up a statement that was addressed to the people of England; but he was recalled to New York before the supreme issue was reached, and thus, through accident, the Declaration of Independence does not contain the signature of John Jay.

* * * * *

In Seventeen Hundred Seventy-eight, Jay was chosen president of the Continental Congress to succeed that other patriotic Huguenot, Laurens.  The following year he was selected as the man to go to Spain, to secure from that country certain friendly favors.

His reception there was exceedingly frosty, and the mention of his two years on the ragged edge of court life at Madrid, in later years brought to his face a grim smile.

Spain’s diplomatic policy was smooth hypocrisy and rank untruth, and all her promises, it seems, were made but to be broken.  Jay’s negotiations were only partially successful, but he came to know the language, the country and the people in a way that made his knowledge very valuable to America.

By Seventeen Hundred Eighty-one, England had begun to see that to compel the absolute submission of the Colonies was more of a job than she had anticipated.  News of victories was duly sent to the “mother country” at regular intervals, but with these glad tidings were requests for more troops, and requisitions for ships and arms.

The American army was a very hard thing to find.  It would fight one day, to retreat the next, and had a way of making midnight attacks and flank movements that, to say the least, were very confusing.  Then it would separate, to come together—­Lord knows where!  This made Lord Cornwallis once write to the Home Secretary:  “I could easily defeat the enemy, if I could find him and engage him in a fair fight.”  He seemed to think it was “no fair,” forgetting the old proverb which has something to say about love and war.