The strict devotion to his personal interests which had enabled Mr. Shackford to acquire a fortune thus early caused him to look askance at a penniless young kinsman with stockings down at heel, and a straw hat three sizes too large for him set on the back of his head.  But Mr. Shackford was ashamed to leave little Dick a burden upon the hands of a poor woman of no relationship whatever to the child; so little Dick was transferred to that dejected house which has already been described, and was then known as the Sloper house.

Here, for three of four years, Dick grew up, as neglected as a weed, and every inch as happy.  It should be mentioned that for the first year or so a shock-headed Cicely from the town-farm had apparently been hired not to take care of him.  But Dick asked nothing better than to be left to his own devices, which, moreover, were innocent enough.  He would sit all day in the lane at the front gate pottering with a bit of twig or a case-knife in the soft clay.  From time to time passers-by observed that the child was not making mud-pies, but tracing figures, comic or grotesque as might happen, and always quite wonderful for their lack of resemblance to anything human.  That patch of reddish-brown clay was his sole resource, his slate, his drawing-book, and woe to anybody who chanced to walk over little Dick’s arabesques.  Patient and gentle in his acceptance of the world’s rebuffs, this he would not endure.  He was afraid of Mr. Shackford, yet one day, when the preoccupied man happened to trample on a newly executed hieroglyphic, the child rose to his feet white with rage, his fingers clenched, and such a blue fire flashing in the eyes that Mr. Shackford drew back aghast.

“Why, it’s a little devil!”

While Shackford junior was amusing himself with his primitive bas-reliefs, Shackford senior amused himself with his lawsuits.  From the hour when he returned to the town until the end of his days Mr. Shackford was up to his neck in legal difficulties.  Now he resisted a betterment assessment, and fought the town; now he secured an injunction on the Miantowona Iron Works, and fought the corporation.  He was understood to have a perpetual case in equity before the Marine Court in New York, to which city he made frequent and unannounced journeys.  His immediate neighbors stood in terror of him.  He was like a duelist, on the alert to twist the slightest thing into a casus belli.  The law was his rapier, his recreation, and he was willing to bleed for it.

Meanwhile that fairy world of which every baby becomes a Columbus so soon as it is able to walk remained an undiscovered continent to little Dick.  Grim life looked in upon him as he lay in the cradle.  The common joys of childhood were a sealed volume to him.  A single incident of those years lights up the whole situation.  A vague rumor had been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings at Christmas.  It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senseless thing to do; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one Christmas Eve.  He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skeptically waiting for something remarkable to happen; once he crawled out of the cot-bed and groped his way to the chimney place.  The next morning he was scarcely disappointed at finding nothing in the piteous little stocking, except the original holes.