“Mrs. Markham is one of the most superior and accomplished women I ever met,” said Mrs. Ford.  Of course he was acquainted with Julia, who was thought to be the belle of all that region?

Barton was slightly acquainted with her, and thought her very beautiful.  His acquaintance with young ladies of her position was very limited, but he could believe that few superiors of hers could be found anywhere, etc.

Poor Bart!

Mrs. Ford presumed that a great many young men had their eyes on her, and it would be a matter of interest to see where her choice would fall.

It was some satisfaction to Bart to feel that he could hear this point referred to without any but the same pain and bruise of heart that any thought of her occasioned.

After dinner, General Ford said to Bart that if he really wished to enter upon the study of the law, he would do what he could for him; that he would permit him to take home such books as he could spare, and when he had read one he would examine him upon it, and give him another.

This was more than had entered Bart’s mind; and so unaccustomed was he to receiving favors, that the sensations of gratitude were new to him, and he hardly expressed them satisfactorily to himself.

His new tutor had taken a real liking to him; he may have remembered that the Major was one of the rising young men in the south-west part of the county, whom he liked also.  He called Barton’s attention to the chapters of Blackstone that would demand his more careful reading, and they parted well pleased with each other.

Bart pushed off across the fields in a right line for home, with the priceless book in his hand; light came to him, and opportunity.  Lord! how his heart and soul and brain arose and went out to meet them!  As the branches of the young forest-tree that springs up by a river-side shoot out, rank, and strong, and full, to the beautiful light and air, and so, too, as the tree grows one-sided and disfigured, the danger is that this embodiment of young force and energy may develop one-sided.  The poetic, upward tendency of his nature will help him, and his devotion to his mother will hold him unwarped, while the struggle with a great, pure, and utterly hopeless passion shall at least make a sacred desert of his heart, where no unhallowed thought shall take root.  His was eminently a nature to be strengthened and purified by suffering.

But he had the law in his hands.  No matter how gnarled, warped or obscure were the paths to its lurking-places, he would find them all out, and pluck out all its meanings, and make its soul his own.  He had already learned from his brother the fallacy of the vulgar judgment of the law, and he knew enough of history to know that some of the wisest and greatest of men were eminent lawyers, and he thought nothing of the moral dangers of the law as a profession.  He had never been even in a magistrate’s court, but he had heard the legends and traditions of the advocates; had read that eminent fiction, Wirt’s Life of Patrick Henry, and a volume of Charles Phillips’s speeches, and had felt that strong inner going forth of the soul that yearned to find utterance in oversweeping speech.