_"To thine own self be true."_ Shakespeare.
There had been a bright side for Griffith in all this change, too. New and warm friends had been made. He had watched with a feeling of joy the enervating influence of slave ownership drop from Beverly's young shoulders--and upon the other boys he felt that it had never cast its blight with a power that would outlast early youth. It filled him with pleasure to find his sons surrounded in the academy and college with the mental atmosphere and influence of freedom, only. He encouraged them to join the debating societies and Greek letter orders which admitted discussion of such topics. Beverly was now in his Sophomore year and was an ardent student of free-soil doctrines. He read and absorbed like a fresh young sponge the political literature of the time. He was always ready and eager to enter the debates of his class upon the ever pregnant and always recurring slavery extension and compromise bills. The young fellows had numerous hot arguments over the position of the different statesmen of the time, and Stephen A. Douglas furnished Beverly with many a hard hour's thinking. Mr. Davenport adhered to Douglas; but Beverly inclined to persistently oppose his point of view. When, at last, Douglas had taken the side of repeal in that famous measure--the Missouri Compromise Bill, which had been at once the hope and the despair of all the great northwest,--Beverly no longer hesitated. He and his father took different sides, finally and forever, in their political opinions. At commencement time, year after year, the governor of the State was made the feature of the college exercises, and he had several times been the guest of Mr. Davenport. This had served to draw to the house many politicians whose talks had given both stimulus and material to Beverly's already ardent political nature, which was so fast leading him outside the bounds reached by his father. The scope and class of his reading often troubled his mother sorely. One day she had gone to Griffith in dismay. It was so seldom that she felt obliged to criticise this eldest son of hers, upon whom she looked with a pride almost beyond words to express, that Griffith was astonished.