"N-no," stammered the boy. "I wisht I was!"

"Well, what's to prevent? We are going to have the completest plant in
the country right here, and it will be a fine chance for your father's
son; the finest in the world."

"'Tain't goin' to do me any good," said Thomas Jefferson dejectedly. "I
got to be a preacher."

Mr. Duxbury Farley looked down at him curiously. He was a religious
person himself, coming to be known as a pillar in St. Michael's Church
at South Tredegar, a liberal contributor, and a prime mover in a plan to
tear down the old building and to erect a new one more in keeping with
the times and South Tredegar's prosperity. Yet he was careful to draw
the line between religion as a means of grace and business as a means of
making money.

"That is your mother's wish, I suppose: and it's a worthy one; very
worthy. Yet, unless you have a special vocation--but there; your mother
doubtless knows best. I am only anxious to see your father's son succeed
in whatever he undertakes."

After that, Thomas Jefferson secretly made Success his god, and was
alertly ready to fetch and carry for the high priest in its temple, only
the opportunities were infrequent.

For, wide as the Paradise field seemed to be growing from Thomas
Jefferson's point of view, it was altogether too narrow for Duxbury
Farley. The principal offices of Chiawassee Coal and Iron were in South
Tredegar, and there the first vice-president was building a hewn-stone
mansion, and had become a charter member of the city's first club; was
domiciled in due form, and was already beginning to soften his final
"r's," and to speak of himself as a Southerner--by adoption.

So sped the winter and the spring succeeding Thomas Jefferson's
thirteenth birthday, and for the first time in his life he saw the
opening buds of the ironwood and the tender, fresh greens of the herald
poplars, and smelled the sweet, keen fragrance of awakening nature,
without being moved thereby.

Ardea he saw only now and then, as old Scipio drove her back and forth
between the manor-house and the railway station, morning and evening. He
had heard that she was going to school in the city, and as yet there
were no stirrings of adolescence in him to make him wish to know more.

As for Nan Bryerson, he saw her not at all. For one thing, he climbed no
more to the spring-sheltering altar rock among the cedars; and for
another, among all the wild creatures of the mountain, your moonshiner