“There is as little mystery in the one as in the other.  You may judge that my sphere of action—­speaking of action in a literal sense—­was rather circumscribed at Gwinnett courthouse:  but, the fact is, I was then but acquiring my education.  I was, for the first time, studying rogues, and the study of rogues is not unaptly fitted to make one take up the business. I, at least, found it to have that effect.  But, even at Gwinnett courthouse, learning as I did, and what I did, there was one passion, or perhaps a modified form of the ruling passion, which might have swallowed up all the rest had time been allowed it.  I was young, and not free from vanity; particularly as, for the first time, my ears had been won with praise and gentle flatteries.  The possession of early, and afterward undisputed talents, acquired for me deference and respect; and I was soon tempted to desire the applauses of the swinish multitude, and to feel a thirsting after public distinction.  In short, I grew ambitious.  I soon became sick and tired of the applauses, the fame, of my own ten-mile horizon; its origin seemed equivocal, its worth and quality questionable, at the best.  My spirit grew troubled with a wholesale discontent, and roved in search of a wider field, a more elevated and extensive empire.  But how could I, the petty lawyer of a county court, in the midst of a wilderness, appropriate time, find means and opportunities even for travel?  I was poor, and profits are few to a small lawyer, whose best cases are paid for by a bale of cotton or a negro, when both of them are down in the market.  In vain, and repeatedly, did I struggle with circumstances that for ever foiled me in my desires; until, in a rash and accursed hour, when chance, and you, and the devil, threw the opportunity for crime in my path!  It did not escape me, and—­but you know the rest.”

“I do, but would rather hear you tell it.  When you speak thus, you put me in mind of some of the stump-speeches you used to make when you ran for the legislature.”

“Ay, that was another, and not the least of the many reverses which my ambition was doomed to meet with.  You knew the man who opposed me; you know that a more shallow and insignificant fop and fool never yet dared to thrust his head into a deliberative assembly.  But, he was rich, and I poor.  He a potato, the growth of the soil; I, though generally admitted a plant of more promise and pretension—­I was an exotic!  He was a patrician—­one of the small nobility—­a growth, sui generis, of the place—­”

“Damn your law-phrases! stop with that, if you please.”