aning against the faded bricks of the old court-house, one
sunburned hand playing nervously with the crumbling particles. His
honest little face was as red as his hair.

The judge started.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, and he looked at the child with his kindly eyes. The
boy was ugly, lean, and stunted in growth, browned by hot suns and
powdered by the dust of country roads, but his eyes caught the gaze of
the judge and held it.

Above his head, on the brick wall, a board was nailed, bearing in black
marking the name of the white-sand street which stretched like a
chalk-drawn line from the grass-grown battlefields to the pale old
buildings of King's College. The street had been called in honour of a
duke of Gloucester. It was now "Main" Street, and nothing more, though
it was still wide and white and placidly impressed by the slow passage
of Kingsborough feet. Beyond the court-house the breeze blew across the
green, which was ablaze with buttercups. Beneath the warm wind the
yellow heads assumed the effect of a brilliant tangle, spreading over
the unploughed common, running astray in the grass-lined ditch that
bordered the walk, hiding beneath dusty-leaved plants in unsuspected
hollows, and breaking out again under the horses' hoofs in the sandy
street.

"Ah!" exclaimed the judge, and a good-natured laugh ran round the group.

"Wall, I never!" ejaculated the elder Burr, but there was no surprise in
his tone; it expressed rather the helplessness of paternity.

The boy faced them, pressing more firmly against the bricks.

"There ain't nothin' in peanut-raisin'," he said. "It's jest farmin' fur
crows. I'd ruther be a judge."

The judge laughed and turned from him.

"Stick to the soil, my boy," he advised. "Stick to the soil. It is the
best thing to do. But if you choose the second best, and I can help you,
I will--I will, upon my word--Ah! General," to a jovial-faced,
wide-girthed gentleman in a brown linen coat, "I'm glad to see you in
town. Fine weather!"

He put on his hat, bowed again, and went on his way.

He passed slowly along in the spring sunshine, his feet crunching upon
the gravel, his straight shadow falling upon the white level between
coarse fringes of wire-grass. Far up the town, at the street's sudden
end, where it was lost in diverging roads, there was visible, as through
a film of bluish smoke, the verdigris-green foliage of King's College.
Nearer at hand the solemn cruciform of the old church was ste