n which was embodied in Reuben Merryweather. Tradition
had bound Reuben in thongs of steel; Abel was conscious only of his
liberated intelligence--of a passionate desire to test to the fullest
the certainty of that liberation. As the elder had suffered beneath the
weight of the established order, so the younger showed the disturbing
effects of a freedom which had resulted from a too rapid change in
economic conditions rather than from the more gradual evolution of
class. When political responsibility was thrust on the plainer people
instead of sought by them, it was but natural that the process of
adjustment should appear rough rather than smooth. The land which had
belonged to the few became after the war within reach of the many.
At first the lower classes had held back, paralyzed by the burden of
slavery. The soil, impoverished, wasted, untilled, rested under the
shadow of the old names--the old customs. This mole-like blindness of
the poorer whites persisted still for a quarter of a century; and the
awakening was possible only after the newer authority was but a shadow;
the past reverence but a delusion. When the black labourer worked, not
freely, but for hire, the wages of the white labourer went up as by
magic. To rise under the old system had been so impossible that Abel's
ancestors had got out of the habit of trying. The beneficent charity of
the great landowners had exhausted the small incentive that might have
remained--and to give had been so much the prerogative of a single
class, that to receive had become a part of the privileges of another.
In that pleasant idyllic period the one act which went unhonoured and
unrewarded was the act of toil. So in the odour of shiftlessness Abel's
father had died; so after ninety years his grandparents still sat by the
hearth to which his mother had called him.

The house, an oblong frame building, newly shingled, was set back from
the road in a straggling orchard of pear-trees, which bore a hard
green fruit too sour to be used except in the form of preserves. Small
shanties, including a woodhouse, a henhouse, and a smokehouse for drying
bacon and hams, flanked the kitchen garden at the rear, while in front a
short, gravelled path, bordered by portulaca, led to the paling gate at
the branch road which ran into the turnpike a mile or so farther on. In
Abel's dreams another house was already rising in the fair green meadow
beyond the mill-race. He had consecrated a strip of g