“What,” says he, “Mr. Carvel hath sent you to Mr. Allen on your uncle’s advice?”

“No,” I answered, “to do my uncle justice, he said not a word to Mr. Carvel about it.”

The captain turned the subject.  He asked me much concerning the rector and what he taught me, and appeared but ill-pleased at that I had to tell him.  But he left me without so much as a word of comment or counsel.  For it was a principle with Captain Clapsaddle not to influence in any way the minds of the young, and he would have deemed it unfair to Mr. Carvel had he attempted to win my sympathies to his.  Captain Daniel was the first the old gentleman asked to see when visitors were permitted him, and you may be sure the faithful soldier was below stairs waiting for the summons.

I was some three weeks with my new tutor, the rector, before my grandfather’s illness, and went back again as soon as he began to mend.  I was not altogether unhappy, owing to a certain grim pleasure I had in debating with him, which I shall presently relate.  There was much to annoy and anger me, too.  My cousin Philip was forever carping and criticising my Greek and Latin, and it was impossible not to feel his sneer at my back when I construed.  He had pat replies ready to correct me when called upon, and ’twas only out of consideration for Mr. Carvel that I kept my hands from him when we were dismissed.

I think the rector disliked Philip in his way as much as did I in mine.  The Reverend Bennett Allen, indeed, might have been a very good fellow had Providence placed him in a different setting; he was one of those whom his Excellency dubbed “fools from necessity.”  He should have been born with a fortune, though I can think of none he would not have run through in a year or so.  But nature had given him aristocratic tastes, with no other means toward their gratification than good looks, convincing ways, and a certain bold, half-defiant manner, which went far with his Lordship and those like him, who thought Mr. Allen excellent good company.  With the rector, as with too many others, holy orders were but a means to an end.  It was a sealed story what he had been before he came to Governor Sharpe with Baltimore’s directions to give him the best in the colony.  But our rakes and wits, and even our solid men, like my grandfather, received him with open arms.  He had ever a tale on his tongue’s end tempered to the ear of his listener.

Who had most influenced my way of thinking, Mr. Allen had well demanded.  The gentleman was none other than Mr. Henry Swain, Patty’s father.  Of her I shall speak later.  He was a rising barrister and man of note among our patriots, and member of the Lower House; a diffident man in public, with dark, soulful eyes, and a wide, white brow, who had declined a nomination to the Congress of ’65.  At his fireside, unknown to my grandfather and to Mr. Allen, I had learned the true principles of government.  Before the House Mr. Swain spoke only under extraordinary emotion, and then he gained every ear.  He had been my friend since childhood, but I never knew the meaning and the fire of oratory until curiosity brought me to the gallery of the Assembly chamber in the Stadt House, where the barrister was on his feet at the time.  I well remember the tingle in my chest as I looked and listened.  And I went again and again, until the House sat behind closed doors.