high, about her throat a string of coral or of amber.  Out on the road, beneath the forest trees, in the radiance of the evening, he rode with his head high and a smile within his eyes.  All the scheming, all the labour and strife of the day, fell from him like rusty armour, and his spirit bathed itself in the thought of that meeting.  She did not always await him at the gate; sometimes he found her half a mile from home, sitting in the sunset light upon a stone beside the road.  Then he dismounted, kissed her, and they walked together back to their nest in the tree of life.  Supper-time would follow, with the lighted candles and the fragrance from Hannah’s kitchen, and the little humorous talk with the old, fond, familiar servants, and the deeper words between husband and wife of things done or to be done; then quiet upon the porch, long silences, broken sentences of deep content, while the glow faded and the stars came out; then the candles again and his books and papers, while she read or sewed beside him.  When his task was done she sang to him, and so drew on the hour when they put out the lights and entered the quiet, spotless chamber where the windows opened to the east.

Rand worked as he had not worked before.  All the springs were running, all the bitter wells were sweet; to breathe was to draw in fulness of life, and all things were plastic to his touch.  Love became genius, and dreaming accomplishment.  In Albemarle, in Virginia, in the country at large, the time was one of excitement, fevered labour, and no mean reward.  The election for President was drawing on.  Undoubtedly the Republicans and Jefferson would sweep the country, but it behooved them to sweep it clean.  The Federalist point of view was as simple.  “Win! but we’ll not make broad the paths before you!  Winning shall be difficult.”  The parties worked like Trojans, and he who could speak spoke as often as any leader of heroic times.

At court house and at tavern banquets, at meetings here and meetings there, barbecues, dinners, races, militia musters, gatherings at crossroads and in the open fields, by daylight and by candlelight and by torchlight, Republican doctrine was expounded, and Federalist doctrine made answer.  The clash of the brazen shields was loud.  It was a forensic people and a plastic time.  He who could best express his thought might well, if there were power in the thought, impress it so deeply that it would become the hall-mark of his age.  His chance was good.  Something more than fame of a day shone and beckoned before every more than able man.  To stamp a movement of the human mind, to stamp an age, to give the design to one gold coin from the mint of Time,—­what other prize worth striving for?  The design?—­one thought of moderate Liberty and the head of Washington, another thought of Liberty and the head of Jefferson, another of License and a head like Danton’s, another of Empire and a conqueror’s head.