"Indians! Indians!"
All was confusion. Paralysed mothers hugged their infants and children screamed, when a boy in the crowd threw a bucket of water on the fire extinguishing the light. In a moment all was still, as the men rushed to arms repelling the attack. That boy was Meriwether Lewis.
"No brother like mine," said little Mary Marks. "Every noble trait is his,—he is a father to us children, a counsellor to our mother, and more anxious about our education than even for his own!"
Charles de St. Memin, a French artist, was in Washington, engraving on copper.
"May I have your portrait as a typical handsome American?" he said to the President's secretary.
Meriwether laughed and gave him a sitting. The same hand that had so lately limned Paul Revere, Theodosia Burr, and the last profile of Washington himself, sketched the typical youth of 1801. Lewis sent the drawing to his mother, the head done in fired chalk and crayon, with that curious pink background so peculiar to the St. Memin pictures.
XXX
THE PRESIDENT TALKS WITH MERIWETHER
Hours by themselves Jefferson sat talking to Lewis. With face sunny, lit with enthusiasm, he spoke rapidly, even brilliantly, a dreamer, a seer, a prophet, believing in the future of America.
"I have never given it up, Meriwether. Before the peace treaty was signed, after the Revolution, I was scheming for a western exploration. We discussed it at Annapolis; I even went so far as to write to George Rogers Clark on the subject. Then Congress sent me to France.
"In France a frequent guest at my table was John Ledyard, of Connecticut. He had accompanied Captain Cook on his voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and now panted for some new enterprise. He had endeavoured to engage the merchants of Boston in the Northwest fur trade, but the times were too unsettled. 'Why, Mr. Jefferson,' he was wont to say, 'that northwest land belongs to us. I felt I breathed the air of home the day we touched at Nootka Sound. The very Indians are just like ours. And furs,—that coast is rich in beaver, bear, and otter. Depend upon it,' he used to say, 'untold fortunes lie untouched at the back of the United States.'"