s for its
wealth, lofty pride, polished manners, and noble and considerate
hospitality. Affluent equally with his younger brother by descent,
marriage had still further contributed toward the growth of possessions,
which a prudent management had always kept entire and always improving.
Such was the condition of William Colleton, the uncle of the young
Ralph, then a mere child, when he was taken by his father into
Tennessee.

There, the fortune of the adventurer still maintained its ancient
aspect. He had bought lands, and engaged in trade, and made sundry
efforts in various and honorable ways, but without success. Vocation
after vocation had with him a common and certain termination, and after
many years of profitless experiment, the ways of prosperity were as far
remote from his knowledge and as perplexing to his pursuit, as at the
first hour of his enterprise. In worldly concerns he stood just where he
had started fifteen years before; with this difference for the worse,
however, that he had grown older in this space of time, less equal to
the tasks of adventure; and with the moral energies checked as they had
been by continual disappointments, recoiling in despondency and gloom,
with trying emphasis, upon a spirit otherwise noble and sufficiently
daring for every legitimate and not unwonted species of trial and
occasion. Still, he had learned little, beyond _hauteur_ and
querulousness, from the lessons of experience. Economy was not more the
inmate of his dwelling than when he was blessed with the large income of
his birthright; but, extravagantly generous as ever, his house was the
abiding-place of a most lavish and unwise hospitality.

His brother, William Colleton, on the other hand, with means hourly
increasing, exhibited a disposition narrowing at times into a
selfishness the most pitiful. He did not, it is true, forego or forget
any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in his household and with
those about him, which form so large a practice among the people of the
south. He could give a dinner, and furnish an ostentatious
entertainment--lodge his guest in the style of a prince for weeks
together, nor exhibit a feature likely to induce a thought of intrusion
in the mind of his inmate. In public, the populace had no complaints to
urge of his penuriousness; and in all outward shows he manifested the
same general characteristics which marked the habit of the class to
which he belonged.

But his selfishne