een one of the kind that go by contraries.

The Passing of Grandison

I

When it is said that it was done to please a woman, there ought perhaps
to be enough said to explain anything; for what a man will not do to
please a woman is yet to be discovered. Nevertheless, it might be well
to state a few preliminary facts to make it clear why young Dick Owens
tried to run one of his father's negro men off to Canada.

In the early fifties, when the growth of anti-slavery sentiment and the
constant drain of fugitive slaves into the North had so alarmed the
slaveholders of the border States as to lead to the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Law, a young white man from Ohio, moved by compassion for
the sufferings of a certain bondman who happened to have a "hard
master," essayed to help the slave to freedom. The attempt was
discovered and frustrated; the abductor was tried and convicted for
slave-stealing, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the
penitentiary. His death, after the expiration of only a small part of
the sentence, from cholera contracted while nursing stricken fellow
prisoners, lent to the case a melancholy interest that made it famous in
anti-slavery annals.

Dick Owens had attended the trial. He was a youth of about twenty-two,
intelligent, handsome, and amiable, but extremely indolent, in a
graceful and gentlemanly way; or, as old Judge Fenderson put it more
than once, he was lazy as the Devil,--a mere figure of speech, of
course, and not one that did justice to the Enemy of Mankind. When asked
why he never did anything serious, Dick would good-naturedly reply, with
a well-modulated drawl, that he did n't have to. His father was rich;
there was but one other child, an unmarried daughter, who because of
poor health would probably never marry, and Dick was therefore heir
presumptive to a large estate. Wealth or social position he did not need
to seek, for he was born to both. Charity Lomax had shamed him into
studying law, but notwithstanding an hour or so a day spent at old Judge
Fenderson's office, he did not make remarkable headway in his legal
studies.

"What Dick needs," said the judge, who was fond of tropes, as became a
scholar, and of horses, as was befitting a Kentuckian, "is the whip of
necessity, or the spur of ambition. If he had either, he would soon need
the snaffle to hold him back."

But all Dick required, in fact, to prompt him to the most remarkable
thing he accomplished b