the living, he had never yet thought ill of life.  He had long been allied with a thinker who, with a low estimate of at least so much of human nature as ran counter to his purposes, yet believed with devoutness in the perfectibility of his species, and had of the future a large, calm, and noble vision.  If Lewis Rand had not Jefferson’s equanimity, his sane and wise belief in the satisfying power of common daylight, common pleasures, all the common relations of daily life; if some strangeness in his nature thrilled to the meteor’s flight, craved the exotic, responded to clashing and barbaric music, yet the two preached the same doctrine.  He believed in the doctrine, though he also believed that great men are not mastered by doctrine.  They made doctrine their servant, their useful slave of the lamp.  He knew—­none better—­that the genie might turn and rend; that there was always one last, one fatal thing that must not be asked.  But his mind was supple, and he thought that he could fence with the genie.  Usually, when he spoke, he believed all that he said, believed it with all the strength of his reason, and yet—­he saw the kingdoms of the world.  To-night, in the autumn air, pure and cold beneath the autumn stars, with the feeling and the fragrance of the forest day about him, in sympathy with his audience, and conscious in every fibre of the presence of the woman whom he loved, he saw no other kingdom than that of high and tranquil thought.

Jacqueline, seated at her open window, listened for the first time to any public utterance of her husband’s.  He was not a man who often spoke of the processes of his thought.  Sometimes, in the house on the Three-Notched Road, he told her, briefly, his conclusions on such and such a matter, but he rarely described the road by which he travelled.  She knew the conservative, the British, the Federal side of most questions.  That was the cleared country, familiar, safe, and smiling; her husband’s side was the strange forest which she had entered and must travel through.  She was yet afraid of the forest, of its lights and its shadows, the rough places and the smooth, the stir of its air and the possibility of wild beasts.  To her it was night-time there, and where the ground seemed fair and the light to play, she thought of the marsh and the will-o’-the-wisp.  She could not but be loyal to the old, trodden ways.  She had married Lewis Rand, not his party or its principles.  But to-night, as she listened, the light seemed to grow until it was dawn in the forest, and the air to blow so cold, strong, and pure that she thought of mountain peaks and of the ocean which she had never seen.  She was no longer afraid of the country in which she found herself.

Rand, standing in the red torchlight above the attentive crowd, preached a high doctrine, preached it austerely, boldly, and well.  He did not speak to-night of the hundred party words, the flaunting banners, systems, expedients, and policies fit for this turn of the spiral, born to be disavowed, discarded, and thrown down by a higher, freer whorl; but he gave his voice for the larger Republicanism, for the undying battle-cry, and the ever-streaming battle-flag.  He had no less a text than the Liberty and Happiness of the human race, and he made no straying from the subject.