“Well, General, I must work while the fit is on; I am thought to be incapable of keeping to any one thing long.”

“How old are you?”

“In my twenty-second year.”

“Have you ever practised speaking in public?”

“I am thought to make sharp and rough answers to folks, quite too much, I believe,” answered Bart, laughing; “but, save in a debating school, where I was ruled out for creating disorder, I’ve never tried speech-making.”

“You will grow more thoughtful as you grow older,” said the General.

“If I do,” said Bart, “I know those who think I can’t grow old fast enough.”

The General gave him the second volume of Blackstone, with the injunction to be two weeks with it.

“Suppose I finish it in a week?”

“You must not; but if you do, bring it back, and take a scolding.”

“Certainly,” said Bart.

The General asked him to go in to tea.  Bart thought that would not do, and excused himself.

* * * * *

The end of another week found Bart at the end of the second volume, and also at General Ford’s office.  The General was away; but he found an opportunity further to cultivate the acquaintance of Mrs. Ford, who introduced him to several of her circle of acquaintance, and permitted him to take the third volume of Blackstone.

The work was finished with the fourth week, to General Ford’s satisfaction, and Bart was then set to try his teeth on Buller’s “Nisi Prius,” made up of the most condensed of all possible abstracts of intricate cases, stated in the fewest possible words, and those of old legal significance, the whole case often not occupying more than four or five lines.

The cases, as there stated, convey no shadow of an idea to the unlearned mind.  What a tussle poor Bart had with them!  How often he turned them over, and bit at and hammered them, before they could be made to reveal themselves.

The General looked grim when he handed him the book, and said that he did so by the advice of Judge Hitchcock.  He also loaned him Adam Smith and Junius, with permission to take any books from his library during the winter, and they parted—­the General to go to his duties in the Legislature, and Barton to work his way on through the winter and into the law.

The devotion of Bart to his books took him wholly from association with others.  He wrote occasionally to Henry, saying little of what he was doing, and going rarely to the post-office, and never elsewhere.  He developed more his care of his mother, and a protecting tenderness to his younger brothers.

Kate Fisher’s little party came and went, without Bart’s attendance.

The Major was spreading himself out in building houses, clearing land, and unconsciously preparing the way to a smash-up; and the immediate care of the family devolved more and more upon the younger brother.