The sun was hot, and dust rose like smoke from the white streak of the road, which blazed beneath a cloudless sky.

The boy was tired and thirsty, and as he tramped along the perspiration rose to his forehead and dropped, upon his shoulder.  With a sigh of satisfaction he came upon the little cottage of his father and saw his stepmother taking the clothes in from the bushes where they had been spread to dry.  It was Saturday, and ironing day, and he hoped for a chance at his lessons before night came, when he was so tired that the facts would not stick in his brain.  He thought that it must be very easy to study in the mornings when you were fresh and eager and before that leaden weight centred behind your eyeballs.

When Marthy Burr saw him she called irritably: 

“I say, Nick, did they take the chickens?”

Nicholas nodded, and, crossing the weeds in the garden, gave her the money from his pocket.

“They didn’t say nothing ‘bout wantin’ more, I ’spose?  Did you tell ’em I was fattenin’ them four pairs of ducks?”

Nicholas shook his head.  No, he hadn’t told them.

“Well, your pa wants you down in the peanut field.  You’d better get a drink of water first.  You look powerful red.”

An hour later, when work was over, he carried his book to the orchard and flung himself down beneath the trees.  The judge had given him a biography of Jefferson, and he had learned his hero’s life with lips and heart.  The day that it was finished he put the volume under his arm and went to the rector’s house.

“I want to join the church,” he said bluntly.

The rector, a kindly, middle-aged man, with a love for children, turned to him in half-puzzled, half-sympathetic inquiry.

“You are young, my child,” he replied, “to be so zealous a Christian.”

“’Tain’t that, sir,” said the boy slowly.  “I don’t set much store by that.  But I’ve got to go to heaven—­because I can’t see Thomas Jefferson no other way.”

The rector did not smile.  He was wiser than his generation, for he left the great man’s own religion to himself and God.  He said merely: 

“When you are older we shall see, my boy—­we shall see.”

Nicholas left with a chill of disappointment, but as he passed along the street his name was called by Juliet Burwell, and she fluttered across to him in all her mystifying flounces and her gracious smile.

“I was at the rector’s,” she said, “and he told me that you wanted to be confirmed—­and I want you to come into my Sunday-school class.”

Nicholas met the kind eyes and blushed purple.  Her beauty took away his breath and made his pulses leap.  The slow, musical drawl of her speech soothed him like the running of clear water.  He felt the image of Thomas Jefferson totter upon its pedestal, but it was steadied with a tremendous lurch.  Jefferson was a man, after all, and this was only a woman.