Some day he purposed to turn out the old worn-out machinery and supply its place with modern inventions, but as yet this ambition was remote, and the mill, worked after the process of an earlier century, had raised his position to one of comparative comfort and respectability.

He was known to be a man of character and ambition.

Already his name had been mentioned as a possible future representative of the labouring classes in the Virginia assembly.

"There is no better proof of the grit that is in the plain people than the rise of Abel Revercomb out of Abner, his father," some one had said of him.

And from the day when he had picked his first blackberries for old Mr.Jonathan and tied his earnings in a stocking foot as the beginning of a fund for schooling, the story of his life had been one of struggle and of endurance.