Ardmore was almost painfully rich, but the usual diversions of the wealthy did not appeal to him, and, having exhausted foreign travel, he spent much time on his estate in the North Carolina hills, where he could ride all day on his own land, and where he read prodigiously in a huge library that he had assembled with special reference to works on piracy, a subject that had attracted him from early youth. It was this hobby that had sealed his friendship with Griswold, who had relinquished the practice of law, after a brilliant start in his native city of Richmond, to accept the associate professorship of admiralty in the law department of the University of Virginia. Marine law had a particular fascination for Griswold from its essentially romantic character. As a law student he had read all the decisions in admiralty that the libraries afforded, and, though faithfully serving the university, he still occasionally accepted retainers in admiralty cases of unusual importance. His lectures were constantly attended by students in other departments of the university for sheer pleasure in Griswold's racy and entertaining exposition of the laws touching the libeling of schooners and the recovery of jettisoned cargoes. Henry Maine Griswold was tall, slender and dark, and he hovered recklessly, as he might have put it, on the brink of thirty. He stroked his thin brown mustache habitually, as though to hide the smile that played about his humorous mouth--a smile that lay even more obscurely in his fine brown eyes. He did violence to the academic traditions by dressing with metropolitan care, gray being his prevailing note, though his scarfs ventured upon bold color schemes that interested his students almost as much as his lectures. The darkest fact of his life--and one shared with none--was his experiments in verse. From his undergraduate days he had written occasionally a little song, quite for his own pleasure in versifying, and to a little sheaf of these things in manuscript he still added a few verses now and then. "Don't worry, Ardy," he was saying to his friend as "all aboard" was called, "and don't be reckless. When you get through looking for the winking eye, come up to Charlottesville and we'll plan _The True Life of Captain Kidd_ that is some day going to make us famous."