They drove all day by field and woodland.  At noon they paused for luncheon beside a bubbling spring in a dell strewn with red leaves, then drove on through the haze of afternoon.  There were few leaves left upon the boughs.  In the fields that they passed the stacked corn had the seeming of silent encampments, deserted tents of a vanished army, russet and empty wigwams drawn against a deep blue sky.  Now and then, in the darker woods, there was a scurry of partridges, the red gleam of a fox, or a vision of antlers, and once a wild turkey, bronze and stately, crossed the road before the chaise.  When they passed a smithy or a mill, the clink of iron, the rush of water, came to them faintly in the smoky air.  That night they slept at the house of a wealthy planter and good Republican, where, after supper, all sat around a great fire, the children on footstools between the elders, and stories were told of hunting, of Indian warfare, and of Tarleton’s raid.  At ten they made a hall and danced for an hour to a negro’s fiddling, then a bowl of punch was brought and the bedroom candles lighted.

In the morning Rand and Jacqueline went on towards Richmond, and at sunset they found themselves before a country tavern, not over clean or comfortable, but famous for good company.  The centre of a large neighbourhood, it had been that day the scene of some Republican anniversary, and a number of gentlemen, sober and otherwise, had remained for supper and a ride home through the frosty moonlight.  Among them were several lawyers of note, and a writer and thinker whose opinion Rand valued.  Besides all these there were at the inn a group of small farmers, a party of boatmen from the James, the local schoolmaster and the parson, a Scotch merchant or two, and the usual idle that a tavern draws.  All were Republicans, and all knew their party’s men.  Rand descended from the chaise amidst a buzz of recognition, and after supper came a demand that he should speak from the tavern porch to an increasing crowd.  He did not refuse.  To his iron frame the fatigue of the day was as naught, and there were men in the throng whom he was willing to move.  It came to him suddenly, also, that Jacqueline had never heard him speak.  Well, he would speak to her to-night.

His was an universal mind.  On occasion he could stoop to praise one party and vituperate another, but that was his tongue serving his worldly interest.  The man himself dealt with humanity, wherever found and in whatever time, however differentiated, however allied, with its ancestry of the brute and its destiny of the spirit; with the root of the tree and the far-off flower and every intermediate development of stem and leaf; with the soil that sustained the marvellous growth, and with the unknown Gardener who for an unfathomable purpose had set the inexplicable seed in an unthinkable universe.  From the ephemera to the star he accepted and conjectured, and while he often thought ill of