in terror of him.
He was like a duelist, on the alert to twist the slightest thing into
a _casus belli_. The law was his rapier, his recreation, and he
was willing to bleed for it.

Meanwhile that fairy world of which every baby becomes a Columbus
so soon as it is able to walk remained an undiscovered continent to
little Dick. Grim life looked in upon him as he lay in the cradle.
The common joys of childhood were a sealed volume to him. A single
incident of those years lights up the whole situation. A vague rumor
had been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings at
Christmas. It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senseless
thing to do; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one Christmas
Eve. He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skeptically
waiting for something remarkable to happen; once he crawled out of
the cot-bed and groped his way to the chimney place. The next morning
he was scarcely disappointed at finding nothing in the piteous little
stocking, except the original holes.

The years that stole silently over the heads of the old man and
the young child in Welch's Court brought a period of wild prosperity
to Stillwater. The breath of war blew the forges to a white heat, and
the baffling problem of the mediaeval alchemists was solved. The baser
metals were transmuted into gold. A disastrous, prosperous time, with
the air rent periodically by the cries of newsboys as battles were
fought, and by the roll of the drum in the busy streets as fresh
recruits were wanted. Glory and death to the Southward, and at the
North pale women in black.

All which interested Dick mighty little. After he had learned to
read at the district school, he escaped into another world. Two
lights were now generally seen burning of a night in the Shackford
house: one on the ground-floor where Mr. Shackford sat mouthing his
contracts and mortgages, and weaving his webs like a great, lean,
gray spider; and the other in the north gable, where Dick hung over a
tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe by the flicker of the candle-ends
which he had captured during the day.

Little Dick was little Dick no more: a tall, heavily built blond
boy, with a quiet, sweet disposition, that at first offered
temptations to the despots of the playground; but a sudden flaring up
once or twice of that unexpected spirit which had broken out in his
babyhood brought him immunity from serious persecution.

The boy's home life at this time