ked the consciences of the powers within. He had had
to fight, and he had fought well and long.

He recalled the day of his first decisive victory--the day when he had
stood alone and the people--the great, free people, the beginning and
the end of all democracies--had rallied to his standard. He had won the
people on that day, and he had never lost them.

But he was of the party first and last. In his youth he had believed in
the divine inspiration of the Jeffersonian principles as he believed in
God. On the Democratic leaders he had thought to find the mantle of
Apostolic Succession. He had believed as the judge believed--with the
passionate credulity of an older political age. Time had tempered, but
it had not dissipated, his fiery partisanship. He sat to-day with the
honours of a party upon him--honours that a few months would see
ratified by a voice nominally the people's. He laughed now as he
remembered that Galt had said that in five years Dudley Webb would be
the most popular man in the State. "When Senator Withers stops
delivering orations, there'll be a call for an orator, and Webb will
arise," he had prophesied. "They don't need him now because the senator
gets off speeches like hot cakes; but mark my words, the first time Webb
is asked to make an address at the unveiling of a Confederate statue,
there won't be a man to stand up against him in Virginia. He's a better
speaker than Withers--only the public doesn't know it, and there'll be
hot times when it finds it out."

The train was slackening for a wayside station. Outside a man was
driving a plough across a field where grain had been harvested. Nicholas
followed with his eyes the walk of the horses, the purple-brown trail of
the plough, the sturdy, independent figure of the driver as he passed,
whistling an air. Over the Virginian landscape--the landscape of a
country where each ragged inch of ground wears its strange, distinctive
charm, where each rotting "worm fence" guards a peculiar beauty for
those who know it--lay the warm hush of full-blown summer.

The man at the plough aroused in Nicholas Burr a sudden exhilaration as
of physical exertion. It brought back his boyhood which had brightened
as he had passed farther from it, and he felt that it would be good on
such an afternoon to follow the horses across fields that were odorous
of the upturned earth.

The train went on slowly, with the shiftless slouch of Southern trains,
the man at the plough