This was more than had entered Bart's mind; and so unaccustomed was he
to receiving favors, that the sensations of gratitude were new to him,
and he hardly expressed them satisfactorily to himself.

His new tutor had taken a real liking to him; he may have remembered
that the Major was one of the rising young men in the south-west part
of the county, whom he liked also. He called Barton's attention to the
chapters of Blackstone that would demand his more careful reading, and
they parted well pleased with each other.

Bart pushed off across the fields in a right line for home, with the
priceless book in his hand; light came to him, and opportunity. Lord!
how his heart and soul and brain arose and went out to meet them! As
the branches of the young forest-tree that springs up by a river-side
shoot out, rank, and strong, and full, to the beautiful light and air,
and so, too, as the tree grows one-sided and disfigured, the danger is
that this embodiment of young force and energy may develop one-sided.
The poetic, upward tendency of his nature will help him, and his
devotion to his mother will hold him unwarped, while the struggle
with a great, pure, and utterly hopeless passion shall at least make
a sacred desert of his heart, where no unhallowed thought shall take
root. His was eminently a nature to be strengthened and purified by
suffering.

But he had the law in his hands. No matter how gnarled, warped or
obscure were the paths to its lurking-places, he would find them all
out, and pluck out all its meanings, and make its soul his own. He had
already learned from his brother the fallacy of the vulgar judgment of
the law, and he knew enough of history to know that some of the wisest
and greatest of men were eminent lawyers, and he thought nothing of