Chapter VIII.

"Myamyn," at Mobile.

Lying in the cool of a sea-borne summer breeze, or tossed in tempests and whirlwinds of white sand, its lights winking at night afar across the somnolent waters of the harbour, or dimmed by the howling hurricanes of winter, on the periphery of a ten-mile reach of lily-white coast where in the season holiday-makers sat musing over the sound of the plashing wave upon the shore of that halcyon sea, or the mad turmoil of the boiling surge, the little township of Mobile² lay some fifty miles from the city. Two banks, a post and telegraph office, two hotels, two little churches, a blacksmith's forge, and eight hundred private dwellings made one of the most favourite health resorts within its range from the city. The streets were not aligned, or culverted, or macadamised. Mobile owed most of its support to the holiday people from the city on Sundays, or the seaside residence of the families of professional men, commercial men, and the wealthy classes.

In a perfect amphitheatre of sand-box trees, which thickly fringed the entire border of the sandy beach, it afforded excellent shelter for the numerous skiffs, yachts and fishing-smacks which abounded in the bay, the water of which was deep enough close to the shore to afford sufficient draught to any ocean-palace in the world. Ship-loads of excursionists were landed page 339every Sunday afternoon in the summer season to inhale the ozone from the wide expanse of ocean and pic-nic here and there amongst the nooks and crannies in the dense growth of sand-box trees, azalea, and pink-flowering hibiscus. The inhabitants of the flourishing village were for the most part fishermen all the year round, and the city aristocracy in the spring time and the summer. The Anglo-Hungarian band which had played at the ball in the State of Georgia was for a long time located there, and it was as fine and complete a band as any band in the metropolis, having for its bandmaster one of Eugene's old comrades, an accomplished cornetplayer, who carried suspended on a pink ribbon and pinned on his breast a silver medal, won by valorous service in the Afghan war as a grenadier of the British yeomanry. Tradition tells of his having been one of the rescue party from Cabul at the battle of Charasiab³, at the head of the Logar valley, and how his life had been saved by Eugene, who cut down three of the enemy surrounding his colour-sergeant and carried him off amidst a shower of musket-balls to the rear. With thirty-two performers, the grand music of the band attracted on Sunday afternoons every man, woman and child of that little village down to the water's edge, where, year in year out large sums of money were subscribed towards the support of the city hospitals and various other charitable institutions by the eager crowds who flocked around the spacious marquée.

Some time after the order of the Supreme Court that Eugene's children should be restored by their mother to him was made and signed by his Honour Judge Fosterleigh, the little bill for the legal services of Warne, Costall and Davitt, including all the expenses which he had paid or incurred in travelling and hotel bills for himself, the junior partner, and the groggy commissioner, was little short of two thousand dollars. Not having sufficient loose cash to pay the bill of costs in full, the head of the firm accepted his offer of fifteen hundred dollars of his own money, and the privilege of applying to the court for the complete carrying out to the letter of the terms of their grandfather the coal-king's will, so far as it related to the children. At the time the will was read it was clearly pointed out to Whitworth by the keen-eye-to-business Bubtitt that an allowance was set apart for the children, insomuch it bequeathed to their mother the sum of two hundred thousand dollars on trust, to be invested by the sole executor, the woolmerchant, and the interest thereof paid by quarterly installments to Marvel, subject to the obligation of maintaining and educating the children. Obtaining a copy of the voluminous document from the titles' office at the law courts, Costall himself interpreted to the doctor the intrinsic meaning of the term "obligation" at law, and he persuaded him to consent to their making an application to the Supreme Court for its opinion and judgment on the question. Eugene had waited six months for his wife's return subsequent to the enacting of the order, and he felt that he had waited long enough for Marvel to change her mind by coming home to live with and look after the children. Instead of doing so, moreover, or page 340even showing a proper motherly instinct towards them, she was continually gallivanting about the city, loitering and frolicking about archery grounds, and almost every night was to be seen at the theatre, opera, or some town-hall concert. He decided on waiting no longer, and consented to the application being made by Warne, Costall and Davitt.

The very day before he expressed his approval of their undertaking, he had been sitting with his children at the mullioned⁴-window facing the bay and, although she knew that Valentine had been ill for a few days and she had not seen him for two, they saw her archly flounce past the very window, in operatic costume, with some new and strange coxcomb where he and the children sat. Notwithstanding that little Pearly rapped at the window-pane she disdained to take any notice, apparently preferring to engross herself with the attentions of her exquisite friend.

Feeling that nothing in the wide world could change the adamantine nature of his gay and giddy wife, and fearing that if she did return it would be for evil instead of good, he coincided with Warne, Costall and Davitt in the idea of their issuing a summons for the deduction from her income of a sum such as the Supreme Court might judge adequate for the maintenance and education of Pearly and Valentine.

Accordingly, an originating summons was taken out by his solicitors at the office of the prothonotary and served upon Hallam, Brassy and Hoare, who were still acting as solicitors for Marvel and accepted service on her behalf. It recited in an opening affidavit the precise terms of the great man's will; it laid particular stress upon the meaning of the word "obligation" at law, and left it to the judge himself to decide what amount should be paid for the purpose. In a few days answering affidavits were forwarded by Hallam, Brassy and Hoare, sworn to by Marvel, chief among which was one stating that the children were outrageously neglected, and that one of them had been ill, because they had not been fed with proper, sufficient, and suitable food. Had this been true, it was a most ridiculous objection on the part of Hallam, Brassy and Hoare. Logic is rare! it provoked the reprisal of a retaliating affidavit from the doctor, pointing out the untruth and absurdity of the illogical proposition as an objection to the allowance being granted. It further narrated that her husband was still perfectly willing to welcome her home to attend to her motherly duties.

About a fortnight after the serving of the originating summons, the application was arranged by the parties to be heard by a judge other than the judge who had gone before into the details of the disruption between the doctor and his wife when the application by Habeas Corpus was made for custody. The brief drawn out by Davitt for the plaintiffs, who were Pearly and Valentine themselves by the next friend, their father, as it was put in the terminology of the law, was entrusted to a different barrister, who had for years also been a fellow-student with Eugene at the university when the doctor was a student for the degree of Master of Arte.

Supported by volumes of legal authorities on the maintenance and page 341education of children, he pointed out to the judge the exact meaning of the clause in the will of their maternal grandfather. He dwelt upon the one word "obligation" as binding on the executor and compelling him, as he was, all through, hostile to the doctor, to leave it to the court to say what equivalent in money should be ordered to be deducted from the income of the children's mother, to render his duties in relation to the will valid and consonant with the law. He also showed the court that in spite of the laudable advice which the judge had given to Mrs. Whitworth on the former occasion, she was still absenting herself from the home of the children; that she was consorting with all sorts of strangers instead; that she refused to contribute a single cent to their support, and that the medical practice of the doctor had fallen off owing to the neglect of it through enforced litigation. He also dwelt on the enormous debt Eugene had incurred in his efforts to bring his children home; how he had done his best in the face of grievous difficulties thrown in his way by his wife to keep them as they should be kept, and had nursed and tended them ever since the day of their restitution.

The Irish-setter headed Lord Dundreary who had been entrusted by Hallam, Brassy and Hoare with the opposition to the grant for the children, might just as well have attempted to stem the tide of the Gulf Stream; for after a few feeble and blundering attempts at confounding the clinching arguments of his learned friend, he relinquished the effort with a loud, inane guffaw, without making the slightest impression upon the court. His pygmy rhetorical sortie was analogous to that of a mongrel barking at the heels of a galloping horse and failing to make any impression upon him: it was so outré that it was not worth the listening, and was hailed with derision by his adversary. His Honour, as soon as the address for the defence, such as it was, had been concluded, asked the counsel for the children what amount he intended to propose for their benefit conjointly. His Honour further suggested that the assessment of the fund might fairly be left to the discretion of the high-sheriff of the law courts, upon the data that their mother's income was, approximately, less than eight thousand a year by eight hundred dollars, as portion of her legacy had been invested at over five percent in the City of New York Bank and under five in consolidated annuities.

The counsel for the defence rose with an unseemly interruption of his Honour's remarks, and stated that he had been informed by his client, the mother of the children, who was the best judge in these matters, that an allowance of two hundred dollars a year would be sufficient. The counsel for the plaintiffs, whom nobody seemed clearly to identify as Warne, Costall and Davitt, or Pearly and Valentine, or the doctor himself, said he felt perfectly satisfied in leaving the whole matter in his Honour's hands.

The next morning the judge's address to the parties occupied fully an hour, in which he animadverted upon the shameful neglect which Marvel had shown towards her infant children and the ill-advice she was following in still endeavouring to blacken her husband's character and rain his pros-page 342pects in his profession. His Honour ridiculed the mean proposition advanced by her through her counsel, that two hundred dollars a year was enough for the children in order that she might keep all the rest for herself, and after a long tirade of reproaches upon the position which she had taken up, he ordered as a punitive measure that the sum of one thousand dollars per annum be deducted from the income of Mrs. Marvel Whitworth and paid every three months for expenditure on their requirements into the office of their solicitors, Messrs. Warne, Costall and Davitt. Furthermore, it was ordered that their creditors should file in the office of the prothonotary an affidavit showing the approximate expenditure incurred upon the children as every quarterly payment became due.

Present in the court amongst the interested parties sat Pearly and Valentine beside their father and the lawyers; while Marvel, her mother, Sukey Bubtiit, the gimlet-eyed Simon, Augustus, and the chronic bronchoasthmatical auntie sat, all in a heap, on one of the back seats—Simon Ernest especially in a state of petrifaction. When the judgment had been read by his Honour, the disgusted black looks on the face of the paradisal bird could only be compared to those on the face of the square-mouthed boy who had lost the Maiden on the old chestnut mare. Still, in spite of the curving downwards of the corners of her pretty mouth and the droop of her facial expression, out of those vindictive black eyes flashed flint and steel and red-hot fire. The doubly-defeated section bundled itself miserably out of the court and adjourned to the nearest and most stylish hotel in the neighbourhood to condole with the sad misfortune of the bird of the sun in being docked of so large a slice of her income—a worse calamity, they one and all agreed, than such a comparative trifle as the loss of the custody of the children. Marvel was cut to the quick.

The doctor went away home with his children to Mobile in the steamer; Pearly labouring under the impression that she had been to a sort of church, as she thought the lawyers were all ministers of the gospel, while Vallie maintained that it was a circus and that they were all silly-billies and clowns. Opening the door as he rang the bell at the Summer Hill home, Emma, the nurse-girl, smiled all over her face and reiterated her gladness at the success with which they had met: further remarking that it served "that bad woman" right; while Pearly reiterated her dislike of the nurse-girl, and Vallie reiterated his dissatisfaction at not having seen a menagerie or any horses at the circus upstairs at all.

The usual routine of the children's lives continued for three months. The first payment of their little income became due. After some attempts on the part of their mother, the wool-merchant and all her relations to disobey the order of the judge, the firm of Warne, Costall and Davitt took out writs of attachment of the bodies of the erring parties and threatened to have them arrested and committed to jail, without the knowledge of the doctor, who certainly did not aspire to the custody of Marvel. However, instead of subjecting themselves to such an indignity as incarceration for page 343debt, they paid over the money to Warne, Costall and Davitt. Costall kept it: execrable Costall!

The payment made not a particle of difference to the children, insomuch the lawyers paid the cheque into their own banking account, and steadfastly refused to advance a single dollar for the benefit of Pearly and Valentine. As far as Eugene and the children were concerned it might have been better if the order for maintenance had never been made at all. It only served to add rancour, hatred, malice and all sorts of uncharitableness to the venomous heart of Marvel, as she took the loss of those thousand dollars to heart far more than the loss of her children. Her first defeat may have been for a time a source of much annoyance, but the subtraction of the allowance for the children from her income was a blow she could not forgive, and a blow which she took every opportunity that came in her way to return. The visits of the paradisal bird became after that like the visits of the angels of Heaven themselves, and for months she neither brought them an apple nor a toy, in seeming revenge for the wrong which they had done their mother.

It was a sad disappointment to the doctor to find that his lawyers had got the best of him and the children. He had imagined they would be contented with the costs which they had been awarded from the other side. Now they had appropriated the childrens' money; but he prayed for the day when he would be able to wash his hands of their money-grubbing office, as indeed his little boy's action on his visit to it himself had seemed to indicate to his father. Moreover, when the order was made for maintenance, he fully expected to be able to pay Warne, Costall and Davitt himself with some long-expected payments of old patients' debts at Sabinnia. Instead of this, owing to continual litigation which obliged him to neglect his practice, and the scandal attaching to his name through the publication in the daily papers of the city and over the whole of the adjoining States of the damnatory affidavits of his wife, he found his income slowly dwindling away, until now he was left with a practice of fifteen hundred dollars a year, while the expenses of his city offices and the villa at Summer Hill amounted to fully two thousand.

Feeling that his mind would be more at ease if unencumbered by so large a domestic outlay, and that he could provide better for the children if he had a smaller house and one in which he could conduct his professional practice, remaining more with the children at home and vacating his rooms in the city, he interviewed the German agent of the medical bureau and was recommended the purchase on terms of a smaller practice at the mouth of the Alabama River. The same day he bought the goodwill of the seaside practice from the then medical practitioner, and after having lived in the spacious and expensive villa at Summer Hill for two years, he removed all his goods and chattels to Mobile, and drove his children, the servants and the nurse-girl there the following day, while the sagacious friend of the children ran alongside of the newly-bought horse all the way.

Everything was expeditiously arranged in the new house, and the work page 344of transferring the seaside practice to Whitworth begun and ended within a week. "Myamyn," the name by which the new villa was known, was a weatherboard villa-ornee within a stone's-throw of the water's edge. In the choice garden the purple bloom of the veronicas and the pink of pale tearoses gleamed among the large masses of syringas, arching ailanthus, flaming dahlias and poppies; while emerald mosses, cool green ferns and vermilion fungi added colour to the sides. There the lily reared her waxen, golden chalice with its furfuraceous⁵ stamens till in its giddy height it trembled on her stem as after a shower she filled with perfume the air around the deodaras, the crimson-berried arbutus, the laurels, the junipers and the Irish yews; while, whispering through its frail foliage the song of the mermaidens or the susurrus of a dreaming child, the Chinese cyprus shaded long beds flecked with hyacinths, smilax and godetias from the burning sand-drifts and the summer sun. The yellow jasmin in full bloom on the wigwam-summerhouse converted the prairie-grass thatch into a roof of gold, while sulphur-coloured butterflies, bumble bees and metallic-tinted insects flitted from flower to flower with the yellow dusty pollen of promiscuous petals powdering their wings. Everywhere the scent of summer flowers the song of birds, the hum of bees. Here and there among the mosaic parterres bordering the green plush lawn the meek little blue-bell held out her tiny cup for the dews of the evening, and the narcissus opened her heart to the rays of the morning. Liquid diamonds fell from the fountains playing their prismatic colours in the glinting limelight of the sun, and coming through an avenue of leafy pines and plane-trees bordered by the polypodium and the osmunda regalis, or flowering fern, the sudden daylight dazzled the eyes, and softened to a very paradise of cavern and grotto and shining waters and tender greenery. The viridarium⁶ might have been the home of Flora⁷ herself, and the perfume of the wild thyme blew over all with messages from the violet and the rose and all the sweet promises of Spring. Myriads of glow-worms lit up the flower-beds and transformed Myamyn into a veritable fairyland at night and a composite microcosm of the garden of Eden.

The children, delighted with the new abode—anything new, bright and changing being always a pleasure to them—revelled in the exquisite garden and in the summer-house, where the honeysuckle, the yellow jessamine and pink, white and blue convolvuli entwined their tendrils of affection around the lattice-work: making poppy-shows from the fallen blossoms and among the long waving grass on the sides of the floral paradise, little russet robin-redbreasts might often have come in the deepening garish day to cover them with leaves, as tired after their rampage about the garden they lay down to sleep and to dream of the advent of their little mate, Cyril, with Vallie's head downwards like a spider.

Located not more than a fortnight in the holiday-makers' town by the sea, the doctor was visited in mingled feelings of pleasure and surprise at Myamyn by Marmaduke Payne, of whom Guinevere had not heard for months. He had obtained a position as night-porter at one of the hotels.

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Eugene wrote at once to his old friend and the erstwhile teacher of his children about the interesting development their histories were taking, urging her to come to Mobile and take charge of his children as a visiting governess, promising to see some of the families on her behalf, so that she might be able to establish a little seminary or kindergarten of her own. Soon a reply came through her husband saying that she intended to leave the priory at Summer Hill; that she only went there as governess on account of her love for Pearly and Valentine, whom she would rather superintend in their little studies than any others she ever knew: that Cyril was enthusiastic at the prospects of playing with Pearly and Vallie again, and as soon as her salary was paid at the termination of the school quarter she would rejoin them at Mobile. She was a woman of sublime constancy and great depth of affection, to which estrangement was alien and incongruous. Her whole heart warmed at the thought of a reunion with her husband, and at the re-installation of her tutelage of Pearly and the little espiégle Valentine; while Eugene rejoiced to hear that his little children were again to be in the care of the classical, the graceful and beneficent Guinevere, to be imbued with the sweetness of her manner and the ineffable clanc timbre of her tone.

Not forgetful of the oft-repeated complaints about the harsh treatment of the children by Emma, he sat on the Cingalese lounge⁸ of the verandah one evening, just returned from parade, as the village bells rang out their vesper tolls across the moonlit sea, and the children appeared at the front gate with the old servant, who had gone out for a walk by herself.

"Look 'ere, doctor," she said opening the gate hurriedly: "that there Hemma ain't no good: I saw her a-sitting with a bloke in the scrub, and the children away down the pier by theirselves. I says to meself says I that there ain't no place for them there children, so I goes down the w'arf and finds me noble 'ere a-hangin' over the side fence a-doin' gymnasters on the rail right over the hedge. That there bay is full of sharks and it's a mercy, to be sure, he didn't fall in and get drownded, where he was a-swingin' over twenty foot deep. He's the boldest boy I've hever been acquainted: I runs up to him and catches him just before a man was runnin' up to him and I brings him 'ome—the scamp. My word, if my mother was 'ere that Hemma would catch it to be sure."

The acrobatic and hazardous Valentine, who had been doing a little of circus trapeze work and Blondin⁹ combined on the rail of the pier barrier, stood looking demurely at his father, as if all the crimes of the world were being laid at his door; while the coy little Pearly, with the corner of her fist in her eye, never letting a chance of a cut at the contumacious Miss E. Powell—to whom Pearly was an implacable foe—slip, said enticingly, "Send her away, puppa, will yer? send naughty Emma away: she's a nasty thing: she smacked me two times this mornin' for nuffin'," when the culprit strutted in from the street.

"Is this true what I hear," he said to her, "about you smacking Pearly again and letting Vallie run into danger while you play the fool in that page 346scrub? but the old servant took up the running and recounted the charge to her face, whereupon an angry altercation between the two girls ensued, calling each other liars and so on, and the nurse-girl said it would only have given him a good ducking if he had fallen into the sea. The look on Vallie, quite en pénitence and in a pre-occupied frame of mind, was quite enough to show his father that the nurse was to blame, and considering her a dangerous attendant upon the children, he paid her her wages there and then, telling her to go away in the morning.

It opened up further avenues for the entrance of Guinevere into Myamyn. It afforded his old companion under the orange and pomegranate trees of the university the opportunity of becoming a second mother to his children, whose young and impressionable minds he fervently hoped would become endowed with her graces and the beauties of her soul, the richest treasures which they through life could enjoy. Morning after morning she came with Cyril and walked home to her lunch in a little cottage with Marmaduke. In the afternoons, after a few months she opened a small school of music and painting for girls, and, counting Pearly and Valentine, she collected altogether over a dozen pupils, with the youngest of whom, after the teaching had ceased for the day, she would stroll along the shore of the open sand-girt sea.

The sweetness, the supernal bliss of Eugene's chequered life he experienced on Sunday mornings in his regular walks from Myamyn to the silvery foreshore of the estuary with only Pearly and Valentine, brown as berries, for companions. Leaving the villa after breakfast, they would trippingly accompany him along a meandering path, through a labyrinth of yellow-tipped gorse and rich prairie grasses, over a natural stone bridge crossing a tiny brooklet, gathering in little baskets its maiden-hair ferns, chattering together merrily in harmony with its prattling music, and exultant over the bath they loved in the crisping crystal waves. During the six months they had trodden that winding mazy path every Sunday morning together, they never met a living soul: sage Solitude had its charms for the little dismembered family: the rippling music of the voices of the children were like silver bells to the soul of Eugene. It was a narrow tortuous track through the salt-grasses, over logs and bridges formed of fallen sand-box trees and loose stones spanning the little stream showing beneath its eddying zig-zag current a shining bed of pebbles and emitting tinkling music to the footsteps of the children. Here and there among its sinuosities and windings lay little dells draped with silvery lichens and clothed with ferns and coral growths and cushions of exquisite mosses of gold and emerald velvet. In happiness that seemed unreal from its very completeness away they wandered together to the beach as the church bells rang out their morning peals and the cattle-bells clanked in the bush. Always in the same cosy and sequestered corner on the shore, in a little round copse cut out by nature from the hibiscus and sand-box fringe, and surrounded by bubbling springs, the children would take off their clothes with the assistance of their father; both of them eager and impatient to page 347plunge into the plashing waves, up to their plump little waists they would stand, ducking their heads under the curling breakers, splashing like two playful little dolphins, while their father stood by with his boots and socks off and his trousers tucked up to his knees. Once there, it was a puzzle to induce them to come out: for if he carried one back to the dry sandy shore the other would venture too far out to sea, and would glory in taking his breath away by creating false alarms that they were being carried away by the undertow. In the fairy alabaster baths below the scarped sandstone cliffs, among the rocks filled with translucent crystal and fit for Phryne¹⁰ or Aphrodite¹¹ herself, they loved to let the confluent murmuring waves lap their feet.

Fully an hour every Sunday morning he watched his little triton and mermaiden, sportive with delirious enjoyment on the plashing confines of the sand-patting waves or imbedding their racing footprints in embroidery of the smooth, wet, brown border of the shore—the marginal tabula rasa of the seas: drying their little bodies, perfect in symmetry, dressing them in the elf-cave copse and revelling in the blissful day-dream that he had them all to himself—all to himself. The poising sea-gulls screeched from aloft, or skimmed gracefully along the surface of the water, parting it in fantastic curves with the white tips of their wings; while the buoyant purling tide strewed along the shore the upborne shells, and the puffing breezes sprinkled them with its silvery grains; while they were garnered into the baskets by the children, or were held close to their ears, harking to the mermaids' songs. All the world was young. It was full and complete recompense to their father for all the money he had spent to find in the love of his ransomed little angels the solace for the loss of Marvel, over whom he had grieved for years. He watched them grow with a proud and jealous solicitude. Through the long vistas of their lives to come he saw visions in long reveries of his little pearl of a girl grown into a fair woman like Guinevere, and his valorous little son a stalwart, noble, brave man, still at his side constant, loyal, united and true, ere yet on the tabula rasa of their lives the trials and emotions of the world had written their autographs.

If ever a call came for him on the Sunday and they were not at school, they would follow him wherever he had to go. They would chase after him into every house. If a baby happened to be there, it was the precious privilege of Pearly to nurse it and sing a lullaby refrain, while Vallie would recall the watch, the trumpet and the toys which he had given to little Percy in his far-away grave. Scenes of death and ghastly scenes too they looked upon in company with their father. They followed him once to a case of suicide, when a banker, suspected of embezzlement, had fired a ball into the region of his heart. Telling them to stay at home resulted in a duet of painful lachrymation in the quick humours of childhood, and they ran out of the house after him crying down the street. He was detained for a minute or so on the way and, as he turned the corner of the street, he caught them peeping around the corner of the bye-way page 348where the prostrate suicide lay. They hid themselves for a while, but eventually found their way into the house and the bedroom. They were known by all. Wherever they went they were encouraged and made welcome.

Prone on the floor and dying lay the young manager of the bank. They helped to turn him over and unfasten his clothes. No sooner had their father removed the silver probe which he had inserted into the bullet-wound in the chest than the nervine little Valentine poked in after it his finger, trying to pull out the ball, while over the dying man knelt his frenzied young wife, reading verses from their big family bible, with little Pearly kneeling down by her side, imitating with her childish accents the words of the woman, and her little hands uplifted in prayer.

The kinetic spirit, the vis vitæ, the stamp of originality and force of character in those little ones, who scarcely knew how to spell the easiest words, their father thought presaged for them a brilliant and triumphant future. Fervently he prayed that none of the scandal of his own hard life would ever weigh down their flights into eminence or pollute the crystal springs of their innocent lives. To keep them pure and unspotted from the world was his constant aim and his perfervid ambition; for what had he but them to love and cherish now?—now that his once-adored Marvel had shamefully turned traitress and had disgraced her husband, herself, her home and her children. The brilliant intellect which they both possessed was to him a harbinger of honours that uncounted gold could not obtain—a grain of mustard seed to ripen and bring forth a hundred-fold; a shield and buckler in the fight and a swelling flood-tide of fortune; a treasure-trove beyond all dreams of treasures; a legacy outshining in power and magnificence all other legacies; the mighty engine that moved the great world; the richest gift under heaven that no thief could steal; the birthright among whose harvests the tares of the enemy would choke and wither: the acme and the paragon of inborn blessings, without which they would be poor indeed.