a lawyer's office in Richmond, which
enabled him to obtain a bird's-eye view of Blackstone and the Revised
Code. Besides this, he was a member of a Law Debating Society, which
ate oysters once a week in a cellar; and he wore, in accordance with
the usage of the most prominent law-students of that day, six cravats,
one over the other, and yellow-topped boots, by which he was
recognized as a blood of the metropolis. Having in this way qualified
himself to assert and maintain his rights, he came to his estate, upon
his arrival at age, a very model of landed gentlemen. Since that time
his avocations have had a certain literary tincture; for having
settled himself down as a married man, and got rid of his superfluous
foppery, he rambled with wonderful assiduity through a wilderness of
romances, poems, and dissertations, which are now collected in his
library, and, with their battered blue covers, present a lively type
of an army of continentals at the close of the war, or a hospital of
invalids. These have all at last given way to the newspapers--a
miscellaneous study very attractive and engrossing to country
gentlemen. This line of study has rendered Meriwether a most perilous
antagonist in the matter of legislative proceedings.

A landed proprietor, with a good house and a host of servants, is
naturally a hospitable man. A guest is one of his daily wants. A
friendly face is a necessary of life, without which the heart is apt
to starve, or a luxury without which it grows parsimonious. Men who
are isolated from society by distance, feel these wants by an
instinct, and are grateful for an opportunity to relieve them. In
Meriwether the sentiment goes beyond this. It has, besides, something
dialectic in it. His house is open to everybody, as freely almost as
an inn. But to see him when he has had the good fortune to pick up an
intelligent, educated gentleman, and particularly one who listens
well!--a respectable, assentatious stranger!--All the better if he has
been in the Legislature, and better still, if in Congress. Such a
person caught within the purlieus of Swallow Barn, may set down one
week's entertainment as certain--inevitable, and as many more as he
likes, the more the merrier. He will know something of the quality of
Meriwether's rhetoric before he is gone.

Then again, it is very pleasant to see Frank's kind and considerate
bearing towards his servants and dependents. His slaves appreciate
this, and hold him in mo