GIVE ME LIBERTY

A sober, if not tedious, merger of history and fiction in this story of an ""innocent bystander"", David Farrill, and that of his neighbor anc idol, Patrick Henry. Here you will find none of the modernisms, the sneers or the leers which made the Erskine name, but rather a quiet story of David, boy into man. First meeting Henry in his childhood, he was vastly impressed with the simply clad, delightfully spoken young man who, imbued with the ideal that man was intended to be free and equal, was to champion the cause some years later and help precipitate the Revolution. We see David's schooling interwoven with occasional glimpses of Henry, now a lawyer; his management of his ancestral estate at fifteen -- and his love for Daffney which after several years culminates in marriage; the outbreak of the Revolution, and David aligned with the dangerously persuasive, ardently patriotic Patrick Henry. Here the book ends, a pleasant if unemphatic panel of history in the making.