Mocket breathed hard with excitement.  “You haven’t been natural for a long time—­but I didn’t know ’t was this—­”

“I am being natural now,” said Rand somewhat sternly.  “I’ve told you, Tom, and now let it alone.  Least said is soonest mended.”

“But—­but—­” stammered the scamp, “are you going over to the other camp?”

Rand did not at once answer.  From a plate on the windowsill he took a crust of bread, and, raising the sash, crumbled it upon the snow without.  The sparrows came at once, alighting near his hand with a tameness that spoke of pleasing association with the providence above them.  “No,” said Rand at last, “I am not going over to the other camp—­if by that you mean the Federalist camp.  Must one forever sign under a captain?  It is not my instinct to serve.—­Now let it alone.”

He closed the window and, turning again to the table, bent over an unrolled map which covered half its surface.  The chart was a large one, showing the vast territory drained by the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi, and the imagination of the cartographer had made good his lack of information.  Rivers and mountains appeared where nature had made no such provision, while the names, quaint and uncouth, with which Jefferson proposed to burden states yet in embryo sprawled in large letters across the yellow plain.  “Assenispia—­Polypotamia—­Chersonesus—­Michigania,” read Rand.  “Barbarous!  I could name them better out of Ossian!” He traced with his finger the lower Ohio.  “This is where Blennerhasset’s island should be.”  The finger went on down the Mississippi.  “What a river!  When it is in flood, it is a sea.  And the rich black fields on either side!  Cotton!  Our Fortunatus purse shall be spun of that.  They call the creeks bayous.  All these little towns—­French and Spanish.  To speak to them of Washington is to speak of the moon—­so distant and so cold.  Here are Indians.  Here are settlers from the East, and the burden of their song is, ’We are so far from the Old Thirteen that we care not if we are farther yet!’”

“Hey!” exclaimed Mocket.  “That’s treason!”

“Here Adam Gaudylock met Wilkinson.  The river narrows here, and runs deep and strong.”  Rand’s hand rested on the coast-line.  “New Orleans,” he said, “but capable of becoming a new Rome.  Here to the westward is the Perdido that they call the boundary,—­then Mexico and the City of Mexico.  If not New Orleans, then Mexico!” He straightened himself with a laugh.  “I am dreaming, Tom—­just as I used to dream in the fields!  Ugh!  I feel the hot sun, and the thick leaves draw through my hands!  Let’s get back to every day.  To-morrow in the House I am going to carry the Albemarle Resolutions.  The last debate is on.  Wirt speaks first, and then I speak.”

“Ludwell Cary is fighting you,” said Mocket.  “Fighting hard.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll be there to hear you speak.  Lord! if I could speak like you, Lewis, and plan like you, and if whiskey would let me alone, and if I wasn’t afraid of the dark, I’d make a stir in the country—­I’d go higher than a Franklin kite!”