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.  When his gaze followed the floating down from a milkweed pod, or marked the scurry of a chipmunk at a white oak’s root, or dwelt upon the fox-grape’s swinging curtain, he would have said, if questioned, that life in the woods and in an Indian country taught a man the use of his eyes.  “Love of Nature” was a phrase at which he would have looked blank, and a talisman which he did not know he possessed, and it may be doubted if he could have defined the word “Romance.”  He whistled as he rode, and presently, the sun rising higher and the clear wind blowing with force, he began to sing,—­

“From the Walnut Hills to the Silver Lake,
Row, boatmen, row! 
Danger in the levee, danger in the brake,
Row, boatmen, row! 
Yellow water rising, Indians on the shore!”

Lewis Rand, perched upon the platform before the cask, his feet dangling, his head thrown back against the wood, and his eyes upon the floating clouds, pursued inwardly and with a swelling heart the oft-broken, oft-renewed argument with his father.  “I do not want to go to the fields.  I want to go to school.  Every chance I’ve had, I’ve learned, and I want to learn more and more.  I do not want to be like you, nor your father, nor his father, and I do not want to be like Adam Gaudylock.  I want to be like my mother’s folk.  You’ve no right to keep me planting and suckering and cutting and firing and planting again, as though I were a negro!  Negroes don’t care, but I care!  I’m not your slave.  Tobacco!  I hate the sight of it, and the smell of it!  There’s too much tobacco raised in Virginia.  You fought the old King because he was a tyrant, but you would make me spend my life in the tobacco-field!  You are a tyrant, too.  I’m to be a man just as you’re a man.  You went your way; well, I’m going mine!  I’m going to be a lawyer, like—­like Ludwell Cary at Greenwood.  I’m not afraid of your horse-whip.  Strike, and be damned to you!  You can break every colt in the country, but you can’t break me!  I’ve seen you strike my mother, too!”