“De Skeltons dey kin go ’dout eatin’ an’ sleepin’ more’n common ev’yday folks,� responded Bob, with dignity.
“Maybe,� said Mrs. Shapleigh sympathetically, “a course of tansy tea would cure him if his spirits are so bad; and if he’d put some old nails in a stone jar and pour some water on them, and take it three times a day, it is as good a tonic as he could find. And if he won’t go out of the library to take any exercise, if you’d persuade him to swing a flat-iron about in either hand, it would expand his lungs and do for exercise.�
None of these suggestions, however, reached young Skelton, shut up in the library, raging like a wild creature.
In a month or two, however, he appeared again, looking exactly as he always had looked, and nobody dared to cast a sympathising glance upon him.
About that time a political pamphlet appeared anonymously. It made a tremendous sensation. It was, for its day, wildly iconoclastic. It pointed out the defects in the social system in Virginia, and predicted, with singular force and clearness, the uprooting of the whole thing unless a change was inaugurated from within. It showed that navigation and transportation were about to be revolutionised by steam, and that, while great material prosperity would result for a time, it meant enormous and cataclysmal changes, which might be destructive or might be made almost recreative.
This pamphlet set the whole State by the ears. On the hustings, in the newspapers, in private and in public, it was eagerly discussed. Even the pulpiteers took a shy at it. The authorship was laid at the door of every eminent man in the State and some outside, and it suddenly came out that it was written by the black-eyed, disappointed boy locked up in the Deerchase library.
The commotion it raised—the storm of blame and praise—might well have turned any head. Its literary excellence was unquestioned. Skelton was considered an infant Junius. But if it produced any effect upon him, nobody knew it, for there was not the smallest elation in his manner, or, in fact, any change whatever in him.
“That pamphlet ends my guardianship,� remarked old Tom Shapleigh shrewdly, “although the boy is still ten months off from his majority.�
Mr. Shapleigh had been vainly trying to get young Skelton to attend the University of Virginia, but at this time, without consulting his guardian, Skelton betook himself to Princeton. To say that old Tom was in a royal rage is putting it very mildly. He felt himself justified in his wrath, but was careful to exercise it at long range—in writing furious letters, to which Skelton vouchsafed no reply. Nevertheless old Tom promptly cashed the drafts made on him by his ward. At Princeton Skelton apparently spent his time reading French novels, smoking, and studying problems in chess; but at the end of two years it was discovered that he had made a higher average than had ever been made by any man at the university except Aaron Burr. As if content with this, however, Skelton left without taking his degree. But about that time he published a pamphlet under his own name. The title was Voices of the People. Its success was vast and immediate, even surpassing that of its predecessor. He was now twenty-two years old, his own master, graceful, full of distinction in his air and manner. The greatest things were expected of him.