ars 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 bi