in the Antrim Glens. There's wild devils among them, and your friend
looked as if he had given the slip to the hounds in the marshes. There
was little left of his breeches.... Drink, man, or you'll get fever
from your wet duds."

I drank, and the strong stuff mounted to my unaccustomed brain; my
tongue was loosened, my ill-temper mellowed, and I found myself telling
this grim fellow much that was in my heart.

"So you're a merchant," he said. "It's not for me to call down an
honest trade, but we could be doing with fewer merchants in these
parts. They're so many leeches that suck our blood. Are you here to
make siller?"

I said I was, and he laughed. "I never heard of your uncle's business,
Mr. Garvald, but you'll find it a stiff task to compete with the lads
from Bristol and London. They've got the whole dominion by the scruff
of the neck."

I replied that I was not in awe of them, and that I could hold my own
with anybody in a fair trade.

"Fair trade!" he cried scornfully. "That's just what you won't get.
That's a thing unkenned in Virginia. Look you here, my lad. The
Parliament in London treats us Virginians like so many puling bairns.
We cannot sell our tobacco except to English merchants, and we cannot
buy a horn spoon except it comes in an English ship. What's the result
of that? You, as a merchant, can tell me fine. The English fix what
price they like for our goods, and it's the lowest conceivable, and
they make their own price for what they sell us, and that's as high as
a Jew's. There's a fine profit there for the gentlemen-venturers of
Bristol, but it's starvation and damnation for us poor Virginians."

"What's the result?" he cried again. "Why, that there's nothing to be
had in the land except what the merchants bring. There's scarcely a
smith or a wright or a cobbler between the James and the Potomac. If I
want a bed to lie in, I have to wait till the coming of the tobacco
convoy, and go down to the wharves and pay a hundred pounds of
sweet-scented for a thing you would buy in the Candleriggs for twenty
shillings. How, in God's name, is a farmer to live if he has to pay
usury for every plough and spade and yard of dimity!"

"Remember you're speaking to a merchant," I said. "You've told me the
very thing to encourage me. If prices are high, it's all the better for
me."

"It would be," he said grimly, "if your name werena what it is, and you
came from elsewhere than the Clyde. D'you think the prou