Long ago, when he was a handsome young giant, he had married above him.

His wife was a beautiful and spirited woman, and when she married the son of her father's tenant, it was with every intention of raising him to her own level in life.

But he was the stronger, and he dragged her down to his.

As her beauty faded and her wit grew biting, he learned to hate her, and to hate learning because she had it, and the refinements of life because she practised them, and law because she came of a family of lawyers.

She was dead and he was glad of it,--and now her son was always at a book, and wanted to be a lawyer! "I'll see him a slave-driver first!" said Gideon Rand to himself, and flecked his whip.
On the other side of the cask Adam Gaudylock whistled along the road.
He, too, had business in Richmond, and problems not a few to solve, but as he was a man who never sacrificed the present to the past, and rarely to the future, he alone of the three really drank the wine of the morning air, saw how blue was the sky, and admired the crimson trailers that the dewberry spread across the road.