This boy had passed several of his early years at the Dudley mansion, the playmate of Elsie, being her cousin, two or three years older than herself, the son of Captain Richard Venner, a South American trader, who, as he changed his residence often, was glad to leave the boy in his brother’s charge.  The Captain’s wife, this boy’s mother, was a lady of Buenos Ayres, of Spanish descent, and had died while the child was in his cradle.  These two motherless children were as strange a pair as one roof could well cover.  Both handsome, wild, impetuous, unmanageable, they played and fought together like two young leopards, beautiful, but dangerous, their lawless instincts showing through all their graceful movements.

The boy was little else than a young Gaucho when he first came to Rockland; for he had learned to ride almost as soon as to walk, and could jump on his pony and trip up a runaway pig with the bolas or noose him with his miniature lasso at an age when some city-children would hardly be trusted out of sight of a nursery-maid.  It makes men imperious to sit a horse; no man governs his fellows so well as from this living throne.  And so, from Marcus Aurelius in Roman bronze, down to the “man on horseback” in General Cushing’s prophetic speech, the saddle has always been the true seat of empire.  The absolute tyranny of the human will over a noble and powerful beast develops the instinct of personal prevalence and dominion; so that horse-subduer and hero were almost synonymous in simpler times, and are closely related still.  An ancestry of wild riders naturally enough bequeaths also those other tendencies which we see in the Tartars, the Cossacks, and our own Indian Centaurs, and as well, perhaps, in the old-fashioned fox-hunting squire as in any of these.  Sharp alternations of violent action and self-indulgent repose; a hard run, and a long revel after it; this is what over-much horse tends to animalize a man into.  Such antecedents may have helped to make little Dick Venner a self-willed, capricious boy, and a rough playmate for Elsie.

Elsie was the wilder of the two.  Old Sophy, who used to watch them with those quick, animal-looking eyes of hers,—­she was said to be the granddaughter of a cannibal chief, and inherited the keen senses belonging to all creatures which are hunted as game, Old Sophy, who watched them in their play and their quarrels, always seemed to be more afraid for the boy than the girl.  “Masse Dick!  Masse Dick! don’ you be too rough wi’ dat gal!  She scratch you las’ week, ‘n’ some day she bite you; ‘n’ if she bite you, Masse Dick!” Old Sophy nodded her head ominously, as if she could say a great deal more; while, in grateful acknowledgment of her caution, Master Dick put his two little fingers in the angles of his mouth, and his forefingers on his lower eyelids, drawing upon these features until his expression reminded her of something she vaguely recollected in her infancy,—­the face of a favorite deity executed in wood by an African artist for her grandfather, brought over by her mother, and burned when she became a Christian.