the land and the small, dilapidated house already occupied by the
Rands. The purchase was in train, and in its own fashion Gideon's
sluggish nature rejoiced. He was as land-mad as any other Virginian, but
he had neither a lavish hand nor a climbing eye. What he loved was the
black earth beneath the tobacco, and to walk between the rows and feel
the thick leaves. For him it sufficed to rise at dawn and spend the day
in the fields overseeing the hands, to come home at dusk to a supper of
corn bread and bacon, to go to bed within the hour and sleep without a
dream until cockcrow, to walk the fields again till dusk and
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.