As the grandmother related it fresh from the primeval sources thatfeed a grandmother's memory, it happened thus:

In the early days of the settlement of Georgia--ah, how green andrustic appears to us now the world in the early days of the settlementof Georgia! Sometimes to women, listening to the stories of theirgrandmothers, it seems better to have lived then than now--hergrandmother was at that time a youthful wife. It was the day of arduous,if not of long, courtship before marriage, when every weddingcelebrated the close of an original romance; and when youthful couples,for bridal trips, went out to settle new States, riding on a pilliongenerally, with their trousseaux following as best they could onsumpter mules; to hear the grandmother describe it made one long to bea bride of those days.

The young husband had the enumeration of qualities that went to themaking of a man of that period, and if the qualities were in theproportion of twelve physical to one intellectual, it does not followthat the grandmother's grandfather was not a man of parts. For, toobtain the hand of his bride, an only tiny child and an heiress, he had togive test of his mettle by ignoring his fortune, studying law, andgetting his license before marriage, and binding himself to live thefirst decade afterward on the proceeds of his practice; a device of thetime thought to be a wholesome corrective of the corrupting influenceof over-wealth in young domesticities.