If it would, I should not combat your prejudices, but we could lie on our oars and eat up the old place, and later on I would hustle for myself.  But it will not.  Now, I have demonstrated that I cannot earn anything by my profession.  I have tried it faithfully and well.  Last year I did not earn enough to pay my office rent.  I never shall in Banbridge, and there is no sense whatever in my striking out in a new place with no prestige and no money.  You and I simply want enough to live on, enough money to buy the wherewithal to keep the flame of life comfortably burning, and I can think of no other way than this grocery business.  People must eat.  You are certainly sure of earning something, if you offer people something they want.  In my profession there is nothing that they do want.”

“But your education,” said his mother.  She thought of the rows of law-books of whose contents she fondly believed her son a master.

“Oh, that is mine still,” said Randolph, “but other people don’t want it.  There is no use, mother, in evading the question.  We live in an age of market values.  We must consider them.  Butter and cheese have a sure market value, and the knowledge of the law in my head has not.  Nobody wants it enough to pay anything for it, to give us a moneyed equivalent wherewith we may buy the things we need.  Therefore, if nobody wants that, we must offer them something else.  When it comes to the rights of our fellow-men to spend their own money as they choose, that is inalienable.  It is about the most firmly established right in the country.  No; people cannot be coerced into buying my little store of knowledge, therefore I will try them with my little store of butter and cheese and eggs and molasses.”

Randolph Anderson laughed.  Aside from regard for his mother’s feelings, he had not the slightest scruple against his business venture.  On the contrary, it rather amused him.  He must have had a latent taste for business, for he quite enjoyed studying the markets and purchasing his stock in trade.  He purchased wisely, too.  He offered a choice stock of goods, or, rather, his two salesmen did.  He himself did not sell much over his own counters, except in the case of a great rush of business.  But it was not from the least sensation of superiority.  It was merely because of a distrust of his own ability to acquit himself well in such a totally different branch of industry.  Anderson was cast on unusually simple and ingenuous lines.  Nobody would have believed it, but he was actually somewhat modest and shy before his own clerks, and realized sensitively his own lack of experience.  So he had a way of subsiding when customers appeared, and retreating to his office in the rear of the building.  He spent most of his time in this office.  It was a very pleasant one, overlooking the river, on which steamboats and canal-boats travelled to the city.  From Anderson’s office the bank of red clay soil sloped to the water’s edge.  He could see