a's tears. Relenting, the lively, light-hearted Harriet covered her cousin's curls with kisses.
"The carriage and horses are at your service. Hunt, fish, lounge as you please," said Colonel Hancock, "for I must be at the courthouse to try an important case."
With thousands of acres and hundreds of negroes, it was the dream of Colonel Hancock to one day drop these official cares and retire altogether into the privacy of his plantation. Already, forty miles away, at the very head spring of the Roanoke river, he was building a country seat to be called "Fotheringay," after Fotheringay Castle.
Back and forth in the gorgeous October weather rode Clark and Julia, watching the workmen at Fotheringay.
Now and then the carriage stopped at an orchard. Passers were always at liberty to help themselves to the fruit. Peaches so abundant that they fed the hogs with them, apples rosy and mellow, grapes for the vintage, were in the first flush of abundance. What a contrast to that autumn in the Bitter Root Mountains!
Then late in November to Fincastle came Governor Lewis and his brother Reuben, on their way to the west. He, too, had been to Washington on business concerning St. Louis.
"The great success of York among the Mandans has decided Reuben to take Tom along," laughed Lewis, as Reuben's black driver dismounted from the carriage—the same family chariot in which Meriwether had brought his mother from Georgia, now on the way to become the state coach of Louisiana.
Black Tom beamed, expansively happy, on York who had been "tuh th' Injun country" where black men were "Great Medicine."
"Ha, Your Excellency," laughed the teasing Harriet, "the beauty of Fincastle dines with us to-night,—Miss Letitia Breckenridge."
"Wait and the Governor will court you," some one whispered to the charming Letitia.
"I have contemplated accompanying my father to Richmond for some time," replied Letitia. "If I stay
