At daylight he was ahorse again, scarcely stiff from his exertion, and feeling the rising joys of a stomach and brain becoming clearer than for years, of all the forms of alcohol. His mind had been bathed in sleep and temperance, the two great physicians, and wiped dry, like the feet of the Prince of sufferers, with women's hairs. Exercise, natural to a Virginian, awakened his flowing spirits again, and he fancied the air grew purer as he advanced into the north, though there was hardly any perceptible change of elevation. The country grew drier, however, as he turned the head springs of the great cypress swamp—the counterbalance of the Dismal Swamp of Virginia—receded from the Chesapeake waters, and approached the tributaries of the Atlantic. At nine o'clock he entered the court-house cluster of Georgetown, a little place of a few hundred people, pitched nearly at the centre of the county one generation before, or about ten years after the independence of the country.
It was a level place of shingle-boarded houses, assembled around a sandy square, in which were both elm and Italian poplar trees; and a double-storied wooden court-house was on the farther side, surrounded by little cabins for the county officers, pitched here and there, and in the rear was a jail of two stories, with family apartments below, and the dungeon window, the debtors' room, and a family bedroom above; and near the jail and court-house stood the whipping-post, like a dismantled pump, with a pillory floor some feet above the ground.
Young maples, mulberry and tulip trees, and ailanthuses grew bravely to make shade along the two streets which pierced the square, and the four streets which were parallel to its sides—pretty lanes being inserted between, to which the loamy gardens ran; and, as the Judge stopped at the tavern near the court, he was told it was "returning day," and the place would soon be filled with constituents assembling to hear how "she'd gone"—she, as the Judge knew well, meaning Sussex County, and "gone" intimating her decision expressed at the polls.
"She's gone for Adams an' Clayton, ain't she, Jonathan Torbert?" asked the innkeeper.
"Yes," spoke a plain, religious-looking man, the teller of the bank; "Johnny Clayton's kept Sussex and Kent in line for Adams; Jeems Bayard and the McLanes have captured Newcastle: Clayton goes to the senate, Louis McLane to the cabinet, the country to the alligators."
"Hurrah for Jackson!" answered the host; "he suits me ever since he whipped the British."
At breakfast Judge Custis recognized a gentleman opposite, wearing smallclothes, and with his hair in a queue, who spoke without other than a passively kind expression:
"Judge."
"Ah! Chancellor!"
The Chancellor was nearly seventy years old, wearing an humble, meditative, yet gracious look, as one whose relations to this world were those of stewardship, and whose nearly obsolete dress was the badge, not of worldly pride, but of perished joys and contemporaries. His unaffected countenance seemed to say: "I wear it because it is useless to put off what no one else will wear, when presently I shall need nothing but a shroud."