Kenric had been always a thinker, though a serf; his elder brother had been a monk, a man of strong sense and some attainment; his mother had been the daughter of one who had known, if he had lost, freedom. With his mother's milk he had imbibed the love of freedom; from his brother's love and teachings he had learned what a freeman should be; by his own passionate and energetic will he had determined to become free. He would have become so ere long, had not accident anticipated his resolve; for he had laid by, already, from the earnings of his leisure hours, above one half of the price whereby to purchase liberty. He was now even more thoughtful and calmer; but his step was freer, his carriage bolder, his head was erect. He was neither afraid to look a freeman in the eye, nor to render meet deference to his superior. For the freeman ever knows, nor is ashamed to acknowledge, that while the equality of man in certain rights, which may be called, for lack of a better title, natural and political, is co-existent with himself, inalienable, indefeasible, immutable, and eternal, there is no such thing whatever, nor can ever be, as the equality of man in things social, more than there can be in personal strength, grace, or beauty, in the natural gifts of intellect, or in the development of wisdom. Of him who boasts that he has no superior, it may almost be said that he has few inferiors. Thereof Kenric--as he rode along with his harness on his back, and his weapons in his hand, a freeman among freemen, a feudal retainer among the retainers, some Norman, some Saxon, of his noble lord--was neither louder, nor noisier, nor more exultant, perhaps the reverse, than his wont, though happier far than he had conceived it possible for him to be. And by his bearing, his comrades and fellows judged him, and ruled their own bearing toward him. The Saxons of the company naturally rejoiced to see their countryman free by his own merit, and, seeing him in all things their equal, gladly admitted him to be so. The haughtier Normans, seeing that he bore his bettered fortunes as became a man, ready for either fortune, admitted him as one who had won his freedom bravely, and wore it as if it had been his from his birth--they muttered beneath their thick mustaches, that he deserved to be a Norman. Edith, on the contrary, young yet, and unusually handsome, who had been the pet of her own people, and the favorite of her princely masters, who had never undergone any severe labor, nor suffered any poignant sorrow, who knew nothing of the physical hardships of slavery, more than she did of the real and tangible blessings of liberty, had ever been as happy and playful as a kitten, and as tuneful as a bird among the branches.