w he would find at his desk
the gentleman who now turned to him.

"Good morning, Mr. Jefferson," said Meriwether Lewis, in the greeting
which he always used.

"Good morning, my son," said the other man, gently, in his invariable
address to his secretary. "And how did Arcturus perform for you this
morning?"

"Grandly, sir. He is a fine animal. I have never ridden a better."

"I envy you. I wish I could find the time I once had for my horses."
He turned a whimsical glance at the piled desk before him. "If our new
multigraph could write a dozen letters all at once--and on as many
different themes, my son--we might perhaps get through. I vow, if I
had the money, I would have a dozen secretaries--if I could find
them!"

The President rose now and stood, a tall and striking figure of a man,
over six feet in height, of clean-cut features, dark hazel eye, and
sandy, almost auburn, hair. His long, thin legs were clad in
close-fitting knee breeches of green velveteen, somewhat stained. His
high-collared coat, rolling above the loosely-tied stock which girded
his neck, was dingy brown in color, and lay in loose folds. He was one
of the worst-clad men in Washington at that hour. His waistcoat, of
red, was soiled and far from new, and his woolen stockings were
covered with no better footwear than carpet slippers, badly down at
the heel.

Yet Thomas Jefferson, even clad thus, seemed the great man that he
was. Stooped though his shoulders were, his frame was so strong, his
eye so clear and keen, though contemplative, that he did not look his
years.

Here was a man, all said who knew him, of whose large soul so many
large deeds were demanded that he had no time for little and
inconsequent things--indeed, scarce knew that they existed. To think,
to feel, to create, to achieve--these were his absorbing tasks; and so
exigent were the demands on his great intellectual resources that he
seemed never to know the existence of a personal world.

He stood careless, slipshod, at the side of a desk cluttered with a
mass of maps, papers, letters in packets or spread open. There were
writing implements here, scientific instruments of all sorts, long
sheets of specifications, canceled drafts, pages of accounts--all the
manifold impedimenta of a man in the full swing of business life. It
might have been the desk of any mediocre man; yet on that desk lay the
future of a people and the history of a world.

He stood, just a trifle stooped,