CHAPTER III.
YOUNG LOVE--THE RETROSPECT.
It will not hurt our young traveller, to leave him on the greensward, in
the genial spring-time; and, as the night gathers over him, and a
helpful insensibility interposes for the relief of pain, we may avail
ourselves of the respite to look into the family chronicles, and show
the why and wherefore of this errant journey, the antecedents and the
relations of our hero.
Ralph Colleton, the young traveller whose person we have described, and
whose most startling adventure in life, we have just witnessed, was the
only son of a Carolinian, who could boast the best blood of English
nobility in his veins. The sire, however, had outlived his fortunes,
and, late in life, had been compelled to abandon the place of his
nativity--an adventurer, struggling against a proud stomach, and a
thousand embarrassments--and to bury himself in the less known, but more
secure and economical regions of Tennessee. Born to affluence, with
wealth that seemed adequate to all reasonable desires--a noble
plantation, numerous slaves, and the host of friends who necessarily
come with such a condition, his individual improvidence, thoughtless
extravagance, and lavish mode of life--a habit not uncommon in the
South--had rendered it necessary, at the age of fifty, when the mind,
not less than the body, requires repose rather than adventure, that he
should emigrate from the place of his birth; and with resources
diminished to a cipher, endeavor to break ground once more in unknown
forests, and commence the toils and troubles of life anew.
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