"Oh I don't know, dear!--he was too good to make a farmer of--or his high spirit wanted to rise in the world--he couldn't rest without trying to be something more than other folks. I don't know whether people are any happier for it."
"Did he go to West Point, grandpa?"
"No dear!--he started without having so much of a push as that; but he was one of those that don't need any pushing; he would have worked his way up, put him anywhere you would, and he did,--over the heads of West Pointers and all, and would have gone to the top, I verily believe, if he had lived long enough. He was as fine a fellow as there was in all the army. I don't believe there's the like of him left in it."
"He had been a major a good while, hadn't he, grandpa?"
"Yes. It was just after he was made captain that he went to Albany, and there he saw your mother. She and her sister, your aunt Lucy, were wards of the patroon. I was in Albany, in the legislature, that winter, and I knew them both very well; but your aunt Lucy had been married some years before. She was staying there that winter without her husband--he was abroad somewhere."
Fleda was no stranger to these details and had learned long ago what was meant by 'wards' and 'the patroon.'
"Your father was made a major some years afterwards," Mr. Ringgan went on, "for his fine behaviour out here at the West--what's the name of the place?--I forget it just now--fighting the Indians. There never was anything finer done."
"He was brave, wasn't he, grandpa?"
"Brave!--he had a heart of iron sometimes, for as soft as it was at others. And he had an eye, when he was roused, that I never saw anything that would stand against. But your father had a better sort of courage than the common sort--he had enough of that--but this is a rarer thing--he never was afraid to do what in his conscience he thought was right. Moral courage I call it, and it is one of the very noblest qualities a man can have."
"That's a kind of courage a woman may have," said Fleda.