the ground.  You never saw Tom, I reckon, for he went off to Mississippi after I sowed him up.  He couldn’t stand it any longer, since it was no use, I licked him in sich short order:  he wasn’t a mouthful.  After that, the whole ground was mine; nobody could stand before me, ’squire; though now the case may be different, for Sumter’s a destrict, ’squire, that a’n’t slow at raising game chickens.”

At the close of this rambling harangue, Mark Forrester, as we may now be permitted to call him, looked down upon his own person with no small share of complacency.  He was still, doubtless, all the man he boasted himself to have been; his person, as we have already briefly described it, offering, as well from its bulk and well-distributed muscle as from its perfect symmetry, a fine model for the statuary.  After the indulgence of a few moments in this harmless egotism, he returned to the point, as if but now recollected, from which he set out.

“Well, then, Master Colleton, as I was saying, ’twas at this same muster that I first saw the ’squire.  He was a monstrous clever old buck now, I tell you.  Why, he thought no more of money than if it growed in his plantation—­he almost throwed it away for the people to scramble after.  That very day, when the muster was over, he called all the boys up to Eben Garratt’s tavern, and told old Eben to set the right stuff afloat, and put the whole score down to him.  Maybe old Eben didn’t take him at his word.  Eben was a cunning chap, quite Yankee-like, and would skin his shadow for a saddle-back, I reckon, if he could catch it.  I tell you what, when the crop went to town, the old ’squire must have had a mighty smart chance to pay; for, whatever people might say of old Eben, he knew how to calculate from your pocket into his with monstrous sartainty.  Well, as I was saying, ’squire, I shouldn’t be afraid to go you a a little bet that old Ralph Colleton is some kin of your’n.  You’re both of the same stock, I reckon.”

“You are right in your conjecture,” replied the youth; “the person of whom you speak was indeed a near relative of mine—­he was no other than my father.”

“There, now—­I could have said as much, for you look for all the world as if you had come out of his own mouth.  There is a trick of the eye which I never saw in any but you two; and even if you had not told me your name, I should have made pretty much the same calculation about you.  The old ’squire, if I rightly recollect, was something stiff in his way, and some people did say he was proud, and carried himself rather high; but, for my part, I never saw any difference ’twixt him and most of our Carolina gentlemen, who, you know, generally walk pretty high in the collar, and have no two ways about them.  For that matter, however, I couldn’t well judge then; I may have been something too young to say, for certain, what was what, at that time of my life.”

“You are not even now so far advanced in years, Mr. Forrester, that you speak of your youth as of a season so very remote.  What, I pray, may be your age?  We may ask, without offence, such a question of men:  the case where the other sex is concerned is, you are aware, something different.”