The Choir Invisible

In jail he spent that spring and summer and autumn. Then an important turn

was given to his history. It seems that among the commissions with which he

was charged on leaving Lexington was one from Edward West, the watchmaker

and inventor, who some time before, and long before Fulton, had made trial

of steam navigation with a small boat on the Town Fork of the Elkhorn, and

who desired to have his invention brought before the American Philosophical

Society of Philadelphia. He had therefore placed a full description of his

steamboat in John's hands with the request that he would enforce this with

the testimony of an eye-witness as to its having moved through water. At

this time, through Franklin's influence, the Society was keenly interested

in the work of inventors, having received also some years previous from

Hyacinthe de Magellan two hundred guineas to be used for rewarding the

authors of improvements and discoveries. Accordingly it took up the subject

of West's invention but desired to hear more regarding the success of the

experiment; and so requested John to appear before it at one of its

meetings. But upon looking for this obscure John and finding him in jail,

the committee were under the necessity of appearing before him. Whereupon,

grown interested in him and made acquainted with the ground of his

unreasonable imprisonment, some of the members effected his release--by

recourse to the attorney with certain well-direct threats that he could

easily be put into jail for his own debts. Not only this; but soon

afterwards the young Westerner was taken into the law-office of one of these

gentlemen, binding himself for a term of years.

It was not until spring that he wrote he humorously of his days in jail; but

when it came to telling her of the other matter, the words refused to form

themselves before his will or his hand to shape them on the paper. He would

do this in the next letter, he said to himself mournfully.

But early that winter Major Falconer had died, and his next letter was but a

short hurried reply to one from her, bringing him this intelligence. And

before he wrote again, certain grave events had happened that led him still

further to defer acquainting her with his new situation, new duties, new

plans.

That same spring, then, during which he was entering upon his career in

Philadelphia, she too began really to live. And beginning to live, she began

to build--inwardly and outwardly; for what is all life but ceaseless inner

and outer building?

As the first act, she sold one of the major's military grants, reserving the

ample, noble, parklike one on which she had passed existence up to this; and

near the cabin she laid the foundations of her house. Not the great

ancestral manor-house on the James and yet a seaboard aristocratic Virginia

country-place: two story brick with two-story front veranda of Corinthian

columns; wide hall, wide stairway; oak wood interior, hand-carved, massive;

sliding doors between the large library and large dining-room; great

bedrooms, great fireplaces, great brass fenders and fire-dogs, brass locks

and keys: full of elegance, spaciousness, comfort, rest.