That was his first winter and he had been nobody. Ah, it was hard work, that beginning. He had had to fight party plans and personal prejudices. He had had to fight the recognised leaders of the legislature, and he had had to fight the men who pulled the strings--the men who stood outside and hoodwinked the consciences of the powers within. He had had to fight, and he had fought well and long. He recalled the day of his first decisive victory--the day when he had stood alone and the people--the great, free people, the beginning and the end of all democracies--had rallied to his standard. He had won the people on that day, and he had never lost them. But he was of the party first and last. In his youth he had believed in the divine inspiration of the Jeffersonian principles as he believed in God. On the Democratic leaders he had thought to find the mantle of Apostolic Succession. He had believed as the judge believed--with the passionate credulity of an older political age. Time had tempered, but it had not dissipated, his fiery partisanship. He sat to-day with the honours of a party upon him--honours that a few months would see ratified by a voice nominally the people's. He laughed now as he remembered that Galt had said that in five years Dudley Webb would be the most popular man in the State. "When Senator Withers stops delivering orations, there'll be a call for an orator, and Webb will arise," he had prophesied. "They don't need him now because the senator gets off speeches like hot cakes; but mark my words, the first time Webb is asked to make an address at the unveiling of a Confederate statue, there won't be a man to stand up against him in Virginia. He's a better speaker than Withers--only the public doesn't know it, and there'll be hot times when it finds it out." The train was slackening for a wayside station. Outside a man was driving a plough across a field where grain had been harvested. Nicholas followed with his eyes the walk of the horses, the purple-brown trail of the plough, the sturdy, independent figure of the driver as he passed, whistling an air. Over the Virginian landscape--the landscape of a country where each ragged inch of ground wears its strange, distinctive charm, where each rotting "worm fence" guards a peculiar beauty for those who know it--lay the warm hush of full-blown summer. The man at the plough aroused in Nicholas Burr a sudden exhilaration as of physical exertion. It brought back his boyhood which had brightened as he had passed farther from it, and he felt that it would be good on such an afternoon to follow the horses across fields that were odorous of the upturned earth. The train went on slowly, with the shiftless slouch of Southern trains, the man at the plough vanished, and Nicholas returned to his thoughts.