ound
premonitory of the real earthquake. That came on a day of days when, as
a reward of merit for having faultlessly recited the eighty-third Psalm
from memory, he was permitted to go to town with his father. Behold him,
then, dangling his feet--uncomfortable because they were stockinged and
shod--from the high buggy seat while the laziest of horses ambled
between the shafts up the white pike and around and over the hunched
shoulder of Mount Lebanon. This in the cool of the morning of the day of
revelations.

In spite of the premonitory tremblings, the true earthquake found Thomas
Jefferson totally unprepared. He had been to town often enough to have a
clear memory picture of South Tredegar--the prehistoric South Tredegar.
There was a single street, hub-deep in mud in the rains, beginning
vaguely at the steamboat landing, and ending rather more definitely in
the open square surrounding the venerable court-house of pale brick and
stucco-pillared porticoes. There were the shops--only Thomas Jefferson
and all his kind called them "stores"--one-storied, these, the wooden
ones with lying false fronts to hide the mean little gables; the brick
ones honester in face, but sadly chipped and crumbling and dingy with
age and the weather.

Also, there were houses, some of them built of the pale red brick, with
pillared porticoes running to the second story; hip-roofed, with a
square balustered observatory on top; rather grand looking and
impressive till you came near enough to see that the bricks were
shaling, and the portico floors rotting, and the plaster falling from
the pillars to show the grinning lath-and-frame skeletons behind.

Also, on the banks of the river, there was the antiquated iron-furnace
which, long before the war, had given the town its pretentious name. And
lastly, there was the Calhoun House, dreariest and most inhospitable inn
of its kind; and across the muddy street from it the great echoing
train-shed, ridiculously out of proportion to every other building in
the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle, once-a-day
train that wheezed and rattled and clanked into and out of it.

Thomas Jefferson had seen it all, time and again; and this he
remembered, that each time the dead, weather-worn, miry or dusty
dullness of it had crept into his soul, sending him back to the
freshness of the Paradise fields and forests at eventide with grateful
gladness in his heart.

But now all this was to be forgo