Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/26

8 was wound a black satin stock pinned with a jet and diamond pin, with a lock of his wife's hair at the back. His hair was a dark auburn, and his eyes those that Emily repeated in time. He was on the Governor's staff as a young man and his honorable discharge with flattering mention of his services is still preserved.

He followed the family profession and went into the law, practising in Amherst, pleading at the Hampshire County Bar, settling the disputes of his friends and neighbors, and drawing the deeds that no modern court has ever been able to set aside or adjudge not binding. He was a pillar in the First Church, although he joined it later in life than was customary, and served its interests with utter fidelity. A gentleman of the old school he was, with a distinction that was elegance, and many a laborer, among the aged recalling him in their own boyhood, spoke with respect amounting to reverence of "The Old Squire." "What he said he meant," was deeply burned into his legend.

Only one of his daughter Emily's sparks of reckless fire flew from his sedate characteristics—his nearest approach to self-indulgence was his sly liking for a horse handsome and fleet. "I always intend to have the best horse in town," he said more than once, as he set off for the court in the shire town across the river. And his lifelong next neighbor, Deacon Luke Sweetser, made this no easy ambition. There was just a hint of the daughter's later flashes in her father's concession to this love of speed and shining form.

He admitted nothing in Emily as different from his other children, or from any daughter. He made no allowances for her—ever; and yet their unspoken