As we passed through the office on our way to breakfast, the bus man entered, and in a loud, retarded chant proclaimed:  “Train for the South!”

The impressive tones in which this announcement was delivered seemed to call for a sudden stir, a rush for bags and coats, a general exodus, but no one in the office moved, and I remember feeling sorry for the bus man as he turned and went out in the midst of a crushing anti-climax.

“I wonder,” I said to my companion, “if anybody ever gets up and goes when that man calls out the trains.”

“I don’t believe so,” he replied.  “I don’t think he calls trains for any such purpose.  He only warns people so they will expect to hear the train, and not be frightened when it goes through.”

* * * * *

Thomas Jefferson is most widely remembered, I suppose, as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the third President, the purchaser of Louisiana, and the unfortunate individual upon whom the Democratic party casts the blame for its existence, precisely as the Republican party blames itself on Washington and Lincoln—­although the lamentable state into which both parties have fallen is actually the fault of living men.

It is significant, however, that of this trio of Jeffersonian items, Jefferson himself selected but one to be included in the inscription which he wrote for his tombstone—­a modest obelisk on the grounds at Monticello.  The inscription mentions but three of his achievements:  the authorship of the Declaration, that of the Virginia statute for religious freedom, and the fact that he was “Father of the University of Virginia.”

Regardless of other accomplishments, the man who built the university and the house at Monticello was great.  It is more true of these buildings than of any others I have seen that they are the autobiography, in brick and stone, of their architect.  To see them, to see some of the exquisitely margined manuscript in Jefferson’s clean handwriting, preserved in the university library, and to read the Declaration, is to gain a grasp of certain sides of Jefferson’s nature which can be achieved in no other way.

Monticello stands on a lofty hilltop, with vistas, between trees, of neighboring valleys, hills, and mountains.  It is a supremely lovely house, unlike any other, and, while it is too much to say that one would recognize it as the house of the writer of the Declaration, it is not too much to say that, once one does know it, one can trace a clear affinity resulting from a common origin—­an affinity much more apparent, by the way, than may be traced between the work of Michelangelo on St. Peter’s at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in his “David.”