IV

THE NEWER EXODUS


One would always remember the first day of a new creation; the day when
God said, _Let there be light_.

It has been said that nothing comes suddenly; that the unexpected is
merely the overlooked. For weeks Thomas Jefferson had been scenting the
unwonted in the air of sleepy Paradise. Once he had stumbled on the
engineers at work in the "dark woods" across the creek, spying out a
line for the new railroad. Another day he had come home late from a
fishing excursion to the upper pools to find his father shut in the
sitting-room with three strangers resplendent in town clothes, and the
talk--what he could hear of it from his post of observation on the porch
step--was of iron and coal, of a "New South," whatever that might be,
and of wonderful changes portending, which his father was exhorted to
help bring about.

But these were only the gentle heavings and crackings of the ground
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