THE General wends his slow way homeward, and is two months about the journey. His progress, broken by many stops, is like both a triumph and a funeral; for double ranks of worshipers line the route and sob or cheer as he passes. The harsh horse-face is seamed of care and worn by sickness; but the slim form is still erect and lance-like, and the blue eyes gleam as hawkishly dangerous as when, behind his low mud walls with the faithful Coffee and his hunting-shirt men, he broke down England's pride at New Orleans. Everywhere the people press about him; for republics are not ungrateful, and for once in a way of politics it is the setting, not the rising sun upon which all eyes are centered. In the end he reaches home, and his country of the Cumberland, as on many a former day, opens its arms to receive him. And now the General, for all his sickness and his well-nigh threescore years and ten, must bend himself to his labors as a planter; for he has come back very poor. He has his acres and his slaves; but debts have piled themselves high, and the tooth of decay can do a devastating deal in eight years. The General goes to work as though life is just begun. The fences are renewed, the buildings repaired, while the plow breaks fresh furrows in fields that have lain fallow too long. To finance his plans, he borrows ten thousand dollars from Editor Blair. Later, by a huddle of months, Congress repays him that one-thousand-dollar fine, of which a quarter of a century before he was mulcted in New Orleans. This latter, interest swollen, is twenty-seven hundred dollars--a sum not treated lightly in this hour of his narrowed fortunes! All goes prosperously. The generous soil, as though for welcome to the General, grants such crops of cotton that the wondering Cumberland folk, as once they did aforetime, come miles to view his fields. When not busy with his planting, the General is immersed in politics. Each day he rides down to Wizard Lewis four miles below; or Wizard Lewis rides those four miles up to the Hermitage. Being together, the pair, over pipe and moderate glass, sagely consider the state of the nation. Down by the General's gate is a large-stomached mail box. Each morning finds it stuffed to suffocation with sheaves of letters and papers tied in bundles. Also there are shoals and shoals of visitors. For the General's home is a Mecca of politics, to which pilgrims of party turn their steps by ones and twos and tens. Some come to do the stark old General honor; some are one-time comrades, or friends who rose up around him on fields of party war. For the most, however, and because humanity is selfish before it is either just or generous, the visitors are office-seeking folk, who ask the magic of the General's signature to their appeals. These selfish ones become, in their vermin number and persistency, a very plague. They wring from the suffering General the following: