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.