For Richard Skelton, Esquire, was certainly born with a golden, not a silver, spoon in his mouth. In his childhood his dark beauty and a certain proud, disdainful air, natural to him, made him look like a little prince. In those days Byron was the poet; and the boy, with his great fortune, his beauty, his orphanhood, his precocious wit and melancholy, was called a young Lara. As he grew older, there were indications in him of strange mental powers, and a cool and determined will that was perfectly unbreakable. He brooded his youth away (in these degenerate days it would be said he loafed) sadly and darkly in the library at Deerchase. Old Tom Shapleigh, his guardian, who feared neither man nor devil, and who was himself a person of no mean powers, always felt, when his ward’s dark, inscrutable eyes were fixed upon him, a ridiculous and awkward inferiority--the more ridiculous and awkward because old Tom really had accomplished a good deal in life, while Richard Skelton could not possibly have accomplished anything at the very early age when he was perfectly commanding, not to say patronising, to his guardian. Old Tom did not take charge of the great Skelton property and the strange Skelton boy for pure love. The profits of managing such a property were considerable, and he was the very best manager of land and negroes in all the region about. But the Skelton boy, from the time he was out of round jackets, always assumed an air toward his guardian as if the guardian were merely his agent. This gave old Tom much saturnine amusement, for he was one of those men whose sense of humour was so sharp that he could smile over his own discomfiture at the hands of a haughty stripling, and could even laugh grimly at the burden of a silly wife, which he had taken upon himself.