and that the next day he was making ready
for a run of iron in the antiquated blast-furnace. This may be only
neighborhood tradition, but it depicts the man: sturdy, tenacious,
dogged; a man to knot up the thread of life broken by untoward events,
following it thereafter much as if nothing had happened.

Such men are your true conservatives. When his son was born, nine years
after the great struggle had passed into history, Caleb, the soldier,
was still using charcoal for fuel and blowing his cupola fire with the
wooden air-pump whose staves had been hooped together by the hands of
his father, and whose motive power was a huge overshot wheel swinging
rhythmically below the stone dam in the creek.

The primitive air-blast being still in commission, it may itself say
that the South, in spite of the war upheaval and the far more seismic
convulsion of the reconstruction period, was still the Old South when
Caleb married Martha Crafts.

It was as much a love match as middle-age marriages are wont to be, and
following it there was Paradise gossip to assert that Caleb's wife
brought gracious womanly reforms to the cheerless bachelor house at the
furnace. Be this as it may, she certainly brought one innovation--an
atmosphere of wholesome, if somewhat austere, piety hitherto unbreathed
by the master or any of his dusky vassals.

Such moderate prosperity as the steadily pulsating iron-furnace could
bring was Martha Gordon's portion from the beginning. Yet there was a
fly in her pot of precious ointment; an obstacle to her complete
happiness which Caleb Gordon never understood, nor could be made to
understand. Like other zealous members of her communion, she took the
Bible in its entirety for her creed, striving, as frail humanity may, to
live up to it. But among the many admonitions which, for her, were no
less than divine commands, was one which she had wilfully disregarded:
_Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers._

Caleb respected her religion; stood a little in awe of it, if the truth
were known, and was careful to put no straw of hindrance in the thorny
upward way. But there are times when neutrality bites deeper than open
antagonism. In the slippery middle ground of tolerance there is no
foothold for one who would push or pull another into the kingdom of
Heaven.

Under such conditions Thomas Jefferson was sure to be the child of many
prayers on the mother's part; and perhaps of some naturally prideful
ho