For those who like life with a good strong flavour to it, Skelton and old Tom Shapleigh, and the people around them, were not devoid of interest. They belonged to a sturdy, well-fed, hard riding, hard drinking, landed aristocracy that was as much rooted to the land as the great oaks that towered in the virgin woods. All landowners are more or less bound to the soil; but these people were peculiarly so, because they had no outside world. There was no great city on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, and their journeys were merely a slight enlargement of their orbit. Their idea of seeing the world was a trip in the family coach to the Springs, where they met exactly the same people, bearing the same names, that they had left at home. This fixity and monotony produced in them an intensity of provincialism, a strength of prejudice, hardly to be conceived of now. They were only a few generations removed from an English ancestry, which in this new land prayed daily, “God bless England, our sweet native country!” Feudalism, in the form of a mild and patriarchal slave system, was still strong with them when it had gone to decay in Europe. The brighter sun had warmed their blood somewhat; they were more fiery and more wary than their forefathers. They were arrogant, yet simple-minded, and loved power more than money. They also loved learning, after their fashion, and kept the roster full at William and Mary College. But their learning was used to perpetuate their political power. By means of putting all their men of parts into politics, they managed to wage successfully an unequal fight for power during many generations. The same kind of equality existed among them as among the Spanish grandees, who call each other by their nicknames as freely as peasants, but are careful to give an outsider all his titles and dignities. There was a vast deal of tinsel in their cloth of gold; their luxuries were shabbily pieced out, and they were not quite as grand as they fancied themselves. But, after all, there is something imposing in a system which gives a man his own land, his house built of his own timber, his bricks made of his own red clay, his servants clothed and shod by his own workmen, his own blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, shoemakers--in short, a little kingdom of which he is the sovereign. Naturally it makes him arrogant, but it also makes him independent; and where each man stands upon punctilio everybody is likely to be polite. So they had few quarrels, but such as they had were deadly. The hair-splitting, the subtleties of the _fin du siècle_ were unknown, undreamed of, by them. Everything was simple and direct--love, hate, fear, remorse, and joy. God and the devil were close to every man. Their lives were fixed, and had the continuity of an epic, instead of the fragmentary, disjointed lives that the people of to-day are living. And as they were necessarily obliged to spend all their mortal