“It proved a curse to him as long as he lived, and never a curse like it was inflicted upon any man’s heirs—”
“I’m bound to say there’s more or less truth—”
“It began to curse me when I was a baby, and it has cursed every hour of my life to this day—”
“Lord, lord, but it’s so! Time and again my wife—”
“I depended on it all through my boyhood and never tried to do an honest stroke of work for my living—”
“Right again—but then you—”
“I have chased it years and years as children chase butterflies. We might all have been prosperous, now; we might all have been happy, all these heart-breaking years, if we had accepted our poverty at first and gone contentedly to work and built up our own wealth by our own toil and sweat—”
“It’s so, it’s so; bless my soul, how often I’ve told Si Hawkins—”
“Instead of that, we have suffered more than the damned themselves suffer! I loved my father, and I honor his memory and recognize his good intentions; but I grieve for his mistaken ideas of conferring happiness upon his children. I am going to begin my life over again, and begin it and end it with good solid work! I’ll leave my children no Tennessee Land!”
“Spoken like a man, sir, spoken like a man! Your hand, again my boy! And always remember that when a word of advice from Beriah Sellers can help, it is at your service. I’m going to begin again, too!”