Page:Melville Davisson Post--The Man of Last Resort.djvu/33

Rh all adapted to the duties of a barrister. Indeed it was very early apparent that nature had intended this man for the precarious vagaries of a public life. He was magnetic, generous, with a splendid presence, and the careless, speculative spirit of a gambler. In truth, Alfred Capland Randal was a politician per se. While in college he had been a restless element, injecting the principles of practical policy into everything he touched, from the Greek-letter fraternities to the examinations in Tacitus, and all with such reckless, jovial abandon that divers sage members of the faculty speculated with much wonder as to which particular penal institution would be his ultimate domicile.

At times the elder Randal had been summoned to attend these grave sittings of the faculty, and straightway thereafter the rigid New England lawyer had lectured his son at great length and with bitter invective, to which the young man attended in a fashion that was amiable, and immediately disregarded in a fashion that was equally amiable. Thus in the Puritanic bosom of the father the conclu-