Mr. Wickham then rose, and made an argument of a similar pattern. No rule, he said, requires an impossibility. Mr. Marshall’s quoit is twice as large as any other; and yet it flies from his arm like the iron ball at the Grecian games from the arm of Ajax. It is an iron quoit, unpolished, jagged, and of enormous weight. It is impossible for an ordinary quoit to move it. With much more of the same sort, he contended that it was a drawn game. After very animated voting, designed to keep up the uncertainty as long as possible, it was so decided. Another trial was had, and Marshall clearly won.
All his life he played this game. There is an account of a country barbecue in the mountain region, where a casual guest saw him, then an old man, emerge from a thicket which bordered a brook, carrying a pile of flat stones as large as he could hold between his right arm and his chin. He stepped briskly up to the company and threw them down. “There! Here are quoits enough for us all.”
Of Marshall’s simple habits, remarkable modesty, and engaging simplicity of conduct and demeanor, every one who knew him speaks. These things were in the grain, and outlasted all the wear and tear of life. “What was it in him which most impressed you?” asked one of his descendants, now a distinguished judge,[48] of an older relative who had known him. “His humility,” was her answer. “With Marshall,” wrote President Quincy, “I had considerable acquaintance during the eight years I was member of Congress, from 1805 to 1813, played chess with him, and never failed to be impressed with the frank, cordial, childlike simplicity and unpretending manner of the man, of whose strength and breadth of intellectual power I was ... well apprised.”
“Nothing was more usual,” we are told, as regards his life in Richmond, “than to see him returning from market, at sunrise, with poultry in one hand and a basket of vegetables in the other.” And, again, some one speaks of meeting him on horseback, at sunrise, with a bag of seeds before him, on his way to his farm, three or four miles out of town. It was of this farm that he wrote to James Monroe, his old friend and schoolmate, about passing so much time in “_laborious relaxation_.” The italics are his own.