They held us dissolute because we enjoyed the life that God had given us, and there I am told the hatred first began.
"When I was a lad of your years, Kenneth, the hall--ours was the castle, theirs the hall--was occupied by two young sparks who made little shift to keep up the pious reputation of their house.

They dwelt there with their mother--a woman too weak to check their ways, and holding, mayhap, herself, views not altogether puritanical.

They discarded the sober black their forbears had worn for generations, and donned gay Cavalier garments.

They let their love-locks grow; set plumes in their castors and jewels in their ears; they drank deep, ruffled it with the boldest and decked their utterance with great oaths--for to none doth blasphemy come more readily than to lips that in youth have been overmuch shaped in unwilling prayer.
"Me they avoided as they would a plague, and when at times we met, our salutations were grave as those of, men on the point of crossing swords.
I despised them for their coarse, ruffling apostasy more than ever my father had despised their father for a bigot, and they guessing or knowing by instinct what was in my mind held me in deeper rancour even than their ancestors had done mine.

And more galling still and yet a sharper spur to their hatred did those whelps find in the realization that all the countryside held, as it had held for ages, us to be their betters.