the kindly old
woman who had taken him under her roof. This atom of humanity, by
some strange miscalculation of nature, was his cousin.

The strict devotion to his personal interests which had enabled
Mr. Shackford to acquire a fortune thus early caused him to look
askance at a penniless young kinsman with stockings down at heel, and
a straw hat three sizes too large for him set on the back of his
head. But Mr. Shackford was ashamed to leave little Dick a burden
upon the hands of a poor woman of no relationship whatever to the
child; so little Dick was transferred to that dejected house which
has already been described, and was then known as the Sloper house.

Here, for three of four years, Dick grew up, as neglected as a
weed, and every inch as happy. It should be mentioned that for the
first year or so a shock-headed Cicely from the town-farm had
apparently been hired not to take care of him. But Dick asked nothing
better than to be left to his own devices, which, moreover, were
innocent enough. He would sit all day in the lane at the front gate
pottering with a bit of twig or a case-knife in the soft clay. From
time to time passers-by observed that the child was not making
mud-pies, but tracing figures, comic or grotesque as might happen,
and always quite wonderful for their lack of resemblance to anything
human. That patch of reddish-brown clay was his sole resource, his
slate, his drawing-book, and woe to anybody who chanced to walk over
little Dick's arabesques. Patient and gentle in his acceptance of the
world's rebuffs, this he would not endure. He was afraid of Mr.
Shackford, yet one day, when the preoccupied man happened to trample
on a newly executed hieroglyphic, the child rose to his feet white
with rage, his fingers clenched, and such a blue fire flashing in the
eyes that Mr. Shackford drew back aghast.

"Why, it's a little devil!"

While Shackford junior was amusing himself with his primitive
bas-reliefs, Shackford senior amused himself with his lawsuits. From
the hour when he returned to the town until the end of his days Mr.
Shackford was up to his neck in legal difficulties. Now he resisted a
betterment assessment, and fought the town; now he secured an
injunction on the Miantowona Iron Works, and fought the corporation.
He was understood to have a perpetual case in equity before the
Marine Court in New York, to which city he made frequent and
unannounced journeys. His immediate neighbors stood