since
the one part that he was fitted to play was the _role_ they and their
ancestors had played beyond the time when the first American among them,
failing to rescue his king from Carisbrooke Castle, set sail for
Virginia on the very day Charles lost his royal head. But for the Civil
War, Crittenden would have played that _role_ worthily and without
question to the end. With the close of the war, however, his birthright
was gone--even before he was born--and yet, as he grew to manhood, he
had gone on in the serene and lofty way of his father--there was
nothing else he could do--playing the gentleman still, though with each
year the audience grew more restless and the other and lesser actors in
the drama of Southern reconstruction more and more resented the
particular claims of the star. At last, came with a shock the
realization that with the passing of the war his occupation had forever
gone. And all at once, out on his ancestral farm that had carried its
name Canewood down from pioneer days; that had never been owned by a
white man who was not a Crittenden; that was isolated, and had its
slaves and the children of those slaves still as servants; that still
clung rigidly to old traditions--social, agricultural, and
patriarchal--out there Crittenden found himself one day alone. His
friends--even the boy, his brother--had caught the modern trend of
things quicker than he, and most of them had gone to work--some to law,
some as clerks, railroad men, merchants, civil engineers; some to mining
and speculating in the State's own rich mountains. Of course, he had
studied law--his type of Southerner always studies law--and he tried the
practice of it. He had too much self-confidence, perhaps, based on his
own brilliant record as a college orator, and he never got over the
humiliation of losing his first case, being handled like putty by a
small, black-eyed youth of his own age, who had come from nowhere and
had passed up through a philanthropical old judge's office to the
dignity, by and by, of a license of his own. Losing the suit, through
some absurd little technical mistake, Crittenden not only declined a
fee, but paid the judgment against his client out of his own pocket and
went home with a wound to his foolish, sensitive pride for which there
was no quick cure. A little later, he went to the mountains, when those
wonderful hills first began to give up their wealth to the world; but
the pace was too swift, competition was