"I tell you a new axiom, Clayton," the earnest engineer cried, putting the negro down on his hams and sitting on him; "whoever employs genius has to be a scoundrel. In the nature of their relations it is so. He deflects genius from its full expression, absorbs the virtue from it, and is a fraud."
Here he kicked the negro underneath him, who hardly protested.
"Well, then," spoke Judge Custis, "as Clayton is a man of genius, and you employ him—"
"I'm a scoundrel, of course," Randel exclaimed. "His sense of law and right must yield to my ideas. Now look at this canal! Had I not been obliged to defer to the soulless corporation which employed me, I would have dug it to the depth that the tides of the two bays would have filled it, instead of damming up the creeks for feeders, and pumping water into it by steam-pumps. Then the war-vessels of the country could go through, and the channel would be purged by every tide."
He stood up and put his foot on the negro, to the amusement of the boys gathering around.
"John Fitch, the engineer," said John M. Clayton, "left a curious will; it begins, 'To William Rowan, my trusty friend, I bequeath my Beaver Hat.'"
Judge Custis's countenance fell, thinking of another hat which had entered his family.
The barge on which they embarked had numerous passengers, and soon came to a small lock-town and turn-bridge, and, a few miles beyond, entered upon a serious piece of work, leaving the trough of a creek, of which the canal had previously availed itself, and cutting through the low ridge of the peninsula, which, to Judge Custis, seemed almost mountainous. He was of that patriotic opulence, just short of imagination, which rejoiced in public works, and this little canal, only fourteen miles long, was, with two or three exceptions, the only achieved work in the Union, turnpikes and bridges omitted. Built by the national government, by three of the states it connected, and by private subscription, it had involved two and a quarter million dollars of expense—no light burden when the population was, by the previous census, less than eight million whites in all the land.
Judge Custis's family troubles faded from his mind as he looked up at the deep cutting, nearly seventy feet in height of banks, with sands of yellow and green, and stains of iron and strata of marl, some of which had fallen back into the excavation and threatened the navigation again; and, when he saw a bridge, called the Buck, leap the chasm ninety feet overhead, by a span that then seemed sublimity itself, he touched Clayton and said:
"Never mind my failures! Thank God, I'm a Whig."