supper-time. Church on Sunday, Charlottesville on Court Days, Richmond
once a year, varied the monotony. The one passion, the one softness,
showed in his love for horses. He broke the colts for half the county;
there was no horse that he could not ride, and his great form and
coal-black locks were looked for and found at every race. The mare that
he was riding he had bought with his legacy, before he bought the land
on the Three-Notched Road. He was now considering whether he could
afford to buy in Richmond a likely negro to help him and Lewis in the
fields. With all the stubbornness of a dull mind, he meant to keep Lewis
in the fields. Long ago, when he was a handsome young giant, he had
married above him. His wife was a beautiful and spirited woman, and when
she married the son of her father's tenant, it was with every intention
of raising him to her own level in life. But he was the stronger, and he
dragged her down to his. As her beauty faded and her wit grew biting, he
learned to hate her, and to hate learning because she had it, and the
refinements of life because she practised them, and law because she came
of a family of lawyers. She was dead and he was glad of it,--and now her
son was always at a book, and wanted to be a lawyer! "I'll see him a
slave-driver first!" said Gideon Rand to himself, and flecked his whip.

On the other side of the cask Adam Gaudylock whistled along the road.
He, too, had business in Richmond, and problems not a few to solve, but
as he was a man who never sacrificed the present to the past, and rarely
to the future, he alone of the three really drank the wine of the
morning air, saw how blue was the sky, and admired the crimson trailers
that the dewberry spread across the road. When his gaze followed the
floating down from a milkweed pod, or marked the scurry of a chipmunk at
a white oak's root, or dwelt upon the fox-grape's swinging curtain, he
would have said, if questioned, that life in the woods and in an Indian
country taught a man the use of his eyes. "Love of Nature" was a phrase
at which he would have looked blank, and a talisman which he did not
know he possessed, and it may be doubted if he could have defined the
word "Romance." He whistled as he rode, and presently, the sun rising
higher and the clear wind blowing with force, he began to sing,--

"From the Walnut Hills to the Silver Lake,
Row, boatmen, row!
Danger in the levee, danger in the brake,