Your lilies are budding beneath the windows; the sweet williams are all in bloom.  I have little news for you of town or country—­Mrs. Randolph, doubtless, sends you all.  Work goes on upon the church.  For me, I worship in the fields with the other beasts of burden or of prey.  The wheat looks well, and there will be this year a great yield of apples.  Major Churchill’s Mustapha won at Winchester.  Colonel Churchill has cleared a large tract of woods behind Fontenoy and will use it for tobacco.  I rode by his plant bed the other day, and the leaf is prime.  I am a judge of tobacco.  They are bitter, the Fontenoy men.  Mr. Ludwell Cary will, I suppose, remain in the county.  He is altering and refurnishing Greenwood.  I suppose that he will marry.  The rains have been frequent this spring, the roads heavy and the rivers turbid.  The stream is much swollen by my house on the Three-Notched Road.  We hear that the feeling grows between General Hamilton and Aaron Burr.  Should the occasion arise, pray commend me to the latter, whose acquaintance I had the honour to make last year when I visited New York.  There, if you please, is a spirit restless and audacious!  The mill on the Rockfish is grinding this spring.  The murder case of which I wrote you will be tried next court day.  One Fitch killed one Thomas Dole in North Garden; knocked at his door one night, called him out, and shot him down.  Dole had thwarted Fitch in some project or other.  I am retained by the State, and I mean to hang Fitch.  Adam Gaudylock says there is a region of the Mississippi where the cotton grows taller than a man’s head.  We may find our gold of Ophir in that plant.  To-night I am a victor.  I salute you, so much oftener than I a victor!  But victory is a mirage:  this that I thought so fair is but a piece of the desert; the magnum bonum shines, looms, and beckons still ahead!  Had I been defeated, I believe I should have been in better spirits.  Now to the papers which you desired me to read and comment upon:  I find—­”

The quill travelled on, conveying to sheet after sheet the opinion upon certain vexed questions of a very able lawyer.  The analysis was keen, the reasoning just, the judgment final, the advice sound.  The years since that determinative hour in the Richmond book-shop had been well harvested.  The paper when he had finished it would have pleased the ideal jurist.

He wrote until the clock struck ten; then folded, sealed, and superscribed his letter, pushed back the heavy hair from his forehead, and rose from the desk.  The long windows opened upon the terrace, and through them came the moonbeams and the fragrance of the April night—­music too, for Mr. Pincornet was playing the violin.  The young man extinguished the candles, and stepped into the silvery world without the room.  Adam Gaudylock had disappeared, and the overseer was gone to bed.  Lights were out in the quarters; the house was as still and white as a mansion in a fairy tale.  Mr. Pincornet was no skilled musician, but the air he played was old and sweet, and it served the hour.  Below their mountain-top lay the misty valleys; to the east the moon-flooded plains; to the west the far line of the Blue Ridge.  The night was cloudless.