When she learned her niddering wrong, and the despite to her unborn child, she cast her curse upon the race, not with loud rant, but long scorn, and went from her widowed mother, to a cold and unknown place. So soon as Bull Garnet was old enough to know right from wrong, and to see how much more of the latter had fallen to his share, two courses lay before him. Two, I mean, were possible to a strong and upright nature; to a false and weak one fifty would have offered, and a little of each been taken. Conscious as he was of spirit, energy, and decision, he might apply them all to very ungenial purposes, to sarcasm, contemptuousness, and general misanthropy. Or else he might take a larger view, pity the poor old–fashioned prigs who despise a man for his fatherʼs fault, and generously adapt himself to the broadest Christianity. The latter course was the one he chose; in solid earnest, too, because it suited his nature. And so perhaps we had better say that he chose no course at all, but had the wiser one forced upon him. Yet the old Adam of damnable temper too often would rush out of Paradise, and prove in strong language that he would not be put off together with his works. Exeter Hall would have owned him, in spite of all his backslidings, as a very “far–advanced Christian;” because he was so “evangelical.” And yet he never dealt in cant, nor distributed idyllic tracts, Sabbatarian pastorals, where godly Thomas meets drunken John, and converts him to the diluted _vappa_ of an unfermented Sunday. And now this man, whom all who knew him either loved or hated, felt the troubles closing around him, and saw that the end was coming. He had kept his own sense of justice down, while it jerked (like a thistle on springs) in his heart; he had worn himself out with thinking for ever what would become of his children, whom he had wronged more heavily than his own bad father had wronged him—only the difference was that he loved them; and most of all he had let a poor fellow, whom he liked and esteemed most truly, bear all the brunt, all the misery, all the despair of fratricide. Now all he asked for, all he prayed for—and, indeed, he prayed more than ever now, and with deeper feeling; though many would have feared to do it—now his utmost hope was to win six months of life. In that time all might be arranged for his childrenʼs interest; his purchase of those five hundred acres from the Crown Commissioners—all good land, near the Romsey–road, but too full of juice—would soon be so completed that he could sell again at treble the price he gave, so well had he reclaimed the land, while equitably his; and then Bob should have half, and Pearl take half (because she had been so injured), and, starting with the proceeds of all his earthly substance before it should escheat, be happy in America, and think fondly of dead father.