But his correspondence with his uncle, Raymond Louis de St. Luc, Marquis de Clermont, not so many years older than himself, covered a period of nearly sixty years filled with world-shaking events, and, though it has been printed for private circulation only, it is a perfect mine of fact, comment and illumination. St. Luc was one of the few French noblemen to foresee the great Revolution in his country, and, while he mourned its excesses, he knew that much of it was justified. His patriotism and courage were so high and so obvious that neither Danton, Marat nor Robespierre dared to attack him. As an old man he supported Napoleon ardently until the empire and the ambitions of the emperor became too swollen, and, while he mourned Waterloo, he told his son, General Robert Lennox de St. Luc, who distinguished himself so greatly there and who almost took the chateau of Hougoumont from the English, that it was for the best, and that it was inevitable. It was the comment of St. Luc, then eighty-five years old and full of experience and wisdom, that a very great man may become too great. Lennox was noted for his great geniality and his extraordinary capacity for making friends. Yet there was a strain of remarkable gravity, even austerity, in his character. There came times when he wished to be alone, to hear no human voices about him. It was then perhaps that he thought his best thoughts and took, too, his best resolutions. In the great silences he seemed to see more clearly, and the path lay straight before him. Many of his friends thought it an eccentricity, but he knew it was an inheritance from his long stay alone upon the island, a period in his life that had so much effect in molding his character. It was this ripeness of mind, based upon fullness of information and deep meditation, that made him such a great man in the true sense of the word. As a speaker he was without a rival either in form or substance in the New World. It was said everywhere in New York that the famous Alexander Hamilton and the equally skillful Aaron Burr went to the courtroom regularly to study his methods. Both admitted quite freely in private that they copied his style, though neither was ever able to acquire the wonderful golden voice, the genuine phenomenon that made Lennox so notable. On one of these occasions, after making a thrilling speech, when he filled the souls of both Hamilton and Burr with despair, a great Onondaga sachem, in the full costume of his nation, said to his friend Willet, once a renowned hunter: "I always knew Dagaeoga could use more words than any one else could find in the biggest dictionary." THE END TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES Page numbers in the table of contents and in the transcriber's notes below refer to the original printed version. Footnotes have been moved to the end of their respective chapters. The following typographical errors in the original printed version have been noted below and corrected only where indicated.