The boy squirmed on his bare, brown feet and wriggled his head from beneath his father’s arm.  He did not answer, but he turned his bright eyes on the judge and flushed through all the freckles of his ugly little face.

“Nick—­that is, Nicholas, sir,” replied the elder Burr with an apologetic cough, due to the insignificance of the subject.  “Yes, sir, he’s leetle, but he’s plum full of grit.  He can beat any nigger I ever seed at the plough.  He’d outplough me if he war a head taller.”

“That will mend,” remarked the lawyer from the neighbouring county with facetious intention.  “A boy and a beanstalk will grow, you know.  There’s no helping it.”

“Oh, he’ll be a man soon enough,” added the judge, his gaze passing over the large, red head to rest upon the small one, “and a farmer like his father before him, I suppose.”

He was turning away when the child’s voice checked him, and he paused.

“I—­I’d ruther be a judge,” said the boy.

He was leaning against the faded bricks of the old court-house, one sunburned hand playing nervously with the crumbling particles.  His honest little face was as red as his hair.

The judge started.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, and he looked at the child with his kindly eyes.  The boy was ugly, lean, and stunted in growth, browned by hot suns and powdered by the dust of country roads, but his eyes caught the gaze of the judge and held it.

Above his head, on the brick wall, a board was nailed, bearing in black marking the name of the white-sand street which stretched like a chalk-drawn line from the grass-grown battlefields to the pale old buildings of King’s College.  The street had been called in honour of a duke of Gloucester.  It was now “Main” Street, and nothing more, though it was still wide and white and placidly impressed by the slow passage of Kingsborough feet.  Beyond the court-house the breeze blew across the green, which was ablaze with buttercups.  Beneath the warm wind the yellow heads assumed the effect of a brilliant tangle, spreading over the unploughed common, running astray in the grass-lined ditch that bordered the walk, hiding beneath dusty-leaved plants in unsuspected hollows, and breaking out again under the horses’ hoofs in the sandy street.

“Ah!” exclaimed the judge, and a good-natured laugh ran round the group.

“Wall, I never!” ejaculated the elder Burr, but there was no surprise in his tone; it expressed rather the helplessness of paternity.

The boy faced them, pressing more firmly against the bricks.

“There ain’t nothin’ in peanut-raisin’,” he said.  “It’s jest farmin’ fur crows.  I’d ruther be a judge.”

The judge laughed and turned from him.

“Stick to the soil, my boy,” he advised.  “Stick to the soil.  It is the best thing to do.  But if you choose the second best, and I can help you, I will—­I will, upon my word—­Ah!  General,” to a jovial-faced, wide-girthed gentleman in a brown linen coat, “I’m glad to see you in town.  Fine weather!”