But a back-flung grimace was all the answer he had.




III

OF THE FATHERS UPON THE CHILDREN


Thomas Jefferson's grandfather, Caleb the elder, was an old man before
his son, Caleb the younger, went to the wars, and he figured in the
recollections of those who remembered him as a grim, white-haired
octogenarian who was one day carried home from the iron-furnace which he
had built, and put to bed, dead in every part save his eyes. The eyes
lived on for a year or more, following the movements of the sympathetic
or curious visitor with a quiet, divining gaze; never sleeping, they
said--though that could hardly be--until that last day of all when they
fixed themselves on the wall and followed nothing more in this world.

Caleb, the son, was well past his first youth when the Civil War broke
out; yet youthful ardor was not wanting, nor patriotism, as he defined
it, to make him the first of the Paradise folk to write his name on the
muster-roll of the South. And it was his good fortune, rather than any
lack of battle hazards, that brought him through the four fighting years
to the Appomattox end of that last running fight on the Petersburg and
Lynchburg road in which, with his own hands, he had helped to destroy
the guns of his battery.