There was a reason why Mr. Faringfield’s face turned dark as a thunder-cloud at this.  You must know, first, that in him alone was embodied the third generation of colonial Faringfields.  The founder of the American branch of the family, having gone pretty nearly to the dogs at home, and got into close quarters with the law, received from his people the alternative of emigrating to Virginia or suffering justice to take its course.  Tossing up his last sixpence, he indifferently observed, on its coming down, that it lay in favour of Virginia.  So he chose emigration, and was shipped off, upon condition that if he ever again set foot in England he should be forthwith turned over to the merciless law.  His relations, as he perceived, cherished the hope that he would die of a fever likely to be caught on the piece of marshy land in Virginia which they, in a belief that it was worthless, had made over to him.  Pondering on this on the voyage, and perhaps having had his fill of the flesh and the devil, he resolved to disappoint his family.  And, to make short a very long story of resolution and toil, he did so, becoming at last one of the richest tobacco-planters in the province.

He might now have returned to England with safety; but his resentment against the people who had exiled him when they might have compounded with justice otherwise, extended even to their country, which he no longer called his, and he abode still by the condition of his emigration.  He married a woman who had her own special reasons for inimical feelings toward the English authorities, which any one may infer who is familiar with one phase (though this was not as large a phase as English writers seem to think) of the peopling of Virginia.  Although she turned over a new leaf in the province, and seems to have been a model wife and parent, she yet retained a sore heart against the mother country.  The feeling of these two was early inculcated into the minds of their children, and their eldest son, in whom it amounted almost to a mania, transmitted it on to his own successor, our Mr. Faringfield of Queen Street.

The second Faringfield (father of ours), being taken with a desire for the civilities and refinements of a town life, moved from Virginia to New York, married there a very worthy lady of Dutch patroon descent, and, retaining his Virginia plantation, gradually extended his business, so that he died a general merchant, with a European and a West Indian trade, and with vessels of his own.  He it was that built the big Faringfield house in Queen Street.  He was of an aspiring mind, for one in trade, and had even a leaning toward book-knowledge and the ornaments of life.  He was, moreover, an exceedingly proud man, as if a haughty way were needful to a man of business and an American, in order to check the contempt with which he might be treated as either.  His large business, his pride, his unreasonable hatred of England (which he never saw), and a very fine and