Circumstance (Volume 4) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the year 1682 John Fairthorne, the youngest son of a small squire of County Essex, emigrated to Pennsylvania. The Fairthornes had lived and died among their turnips in tranquil decency, with no distinguishing excess of vices or virtues. They were small gentlefolk and contented, neither rising nor falling in the social scale. The younger sons were, by custom and of necessity, tumbled out of the home nest and disposed of in the army or navy or, more rarely, in business. Generally they did well, but no Fairthorne was ever spoken of as a man of distinction. The women had notable beauty, and the race was tall and sturdy. John Fairthorne, the emigrant, was a serious youth, and pleased Mr. Penn, the proprietary, although he never gave up the Church of England. He had of Penn, for one hundred pounds, five thousand acres in and about the Welsh barony in Chester County, then by no means so important or valuable a possession as it looks to the modern view. Fairthorne soon sold his land, became a trader in furs, and by and by had coasters and trafficked with the other colonies. He became rich, and had sons and daughters. In their new environment, that happened to the Fairthornes which happened to many children of English race whose people had made no mark in the older land. From the time John Fairthorne landed in Pennsylvania the Fairthornes became and remained people of signal importance. In every generation some one of them rose to distinctive place. They had a hand in every war and in time of peace won success at the bar or in the ventures of East Indian commerce. They were notably few in number, long livers, and well-built, handsome folk. Calmly assured of their own position, they were generally sensitive as to familiar approach, and had been, perhaps because of a certain gravi...