fice without any
reservations, and he paid his daily fee of tenure as had all the other
students before him, scorning not the broom. Indeed, his conscience in
small things augured well, for it was little cousin to his conscience
in great things. Ardent, ambitious, and resolute, he fell upon
Blackstone, Chitty, and Kent, as though he were asked to carry a
redoubt. He read six, eight, ten hours a day, until his head buzzed,
and he forgot what he had read. Then at it all over again, with teeth
set. Thus through more than a year he toiled, lashed forward by his
own determination, until at length he began to see some of the
beautiful first principles of the law--that law, once noble and
beneficent, now degraded and debased; once designed for the protection
of the individual, now used by society as the instrument for the
individual's extermination. So in his second year Franklin fared
somewhat beyond principles merely, and got into notes and bills, torts,
contracts, and remedies. He learned with a shiver how a promise might
legally be broken, how a gift should be regarded with suspicion, how a
sacred legacy might be set aside. He read these things again and
again, and forced them into his brain, so that they might never be
forgotten; yet this part of the law he loved not so much as its grand
first principles of truth and justice.

One morning, after Franklin had finished his task of sweeping down the
stairs, he sat him down by the window with Battersleigh's letter in his
hand; for this was now the third day since he had received this letter,
and it had been in his mind more vividly present than the pages of the
work on contracts with which he was then occupied. It was a bright,
fresh morning in the early spring. A little bird was singing somewhere
near the window. From where Franklin sat he could see the green grass
just starting, over in the courthouse yard. A long and lazy street lay
in perspective before the window, and along it, out beyond the confines
of the town, there reached the flat monotony of the dark prairie soil.
The leaves of the soft maples were beginning to show over there, near
the village church. A dog crossed the street, pausing midway of the
crossing to scratch his ear. The cart of the leading grocer was
hitched in front of his store, and an idle citizen or two paused near
by to exchange a morning greeting. All the little, uneventful day was
beginning, as it had begun so many times before he