"Good morning, my son," said the other man, gently, in his invariable address to his secretary. "And how did Arcturus perform for you this morning?"
"Grandly, sir. He is a fine animal. I have never ridden a better."
"I envy you. I wish I could find the time I once had for my horses." He turned a whimsical glance at the piled desk before him. "If our new multigraph could write a dozen letters all at once--and on as many different themes, my son--we might perhaps get through. I vow, if I had the money, I would have a dozen secretaries--if I could find them!"
The President rose now and stood, a tall and striking figure of a man, over six feet in height, of clean-cut features, dark hazel eye, and sandy, almost auburn, hair. His long, thin legs were clad in close-fitting knee breeches of green velveteen, somewhat stained. His high-collared coat, rolling above the loosely-tied stock which girded his neck, was dingy brown in color, and lay in loose folds. He was one of the worst-clad men in Washington at that hour. His waistcoat, of red, was soiled and far from new, and his woolen stockings were covered with no better footwear than carpet slippers, badly down at the heel.
Yet Thomas Jefferson, even clad thus, seemed the great man that he was. Stooped though his shoulders were, his frame was so strong, his eye so clear and keen, though contemplative, that he did not look his years.
Here was a man, all said who knew him, of whose large soul so many large deeds were demanded that he had no time for little and inconsequent things--indeed, scarce knew that they existed. To think, to feel, to create, to achieve--these were his absorbing tasks; and so exigent were the demands on his great intellectual resources that he seemed never to know the existence of a personal world.
He stood careless, slipshod, at the side of a desk cluttered with a mass of maps, papers, letters in packets or spread open. There were writing implements here, scientific instruments of all sorts, long sheets of specifications, canceled drafts, pages of accounts--all the manifold impedimenta of a man in the full swing of business life. It might have been the desk of any mediocre man; yet on that desk lay the future of a people and the history of a world.
He stood, just a trifle stooped, smiling quizzically at the young man, yet half lovingly; for to no other being in the world did he ever give the confidence that he accorded Meriwether Lewis.
"I do not see how I could be President without you, Merne, my son," said he, employing the familiar term that Meriwether Lewis had not elsewhere heard used, except by his mother. "Look what we must do today!"