e next few weeks, and I remember now in great
detail the last talk we had together before he handed over the shop
and me to his successor. For he had the good luck to sell his business,
"lock, stock, and barrel"--in which expression I found myself and my
indentures included. The horrors of a sale by auction of the furniture
even were avoided.

I remember that either coming or going on that occasion, Ruck, the
butcher, stood in his doorway and regarded us with a grin that showed
his long teeth.

"You half-witted hog!" said my uncle. "You grinning hyaena"; and then,
"Pleasant day, Mr. Ruck."

"Goin' to make your fortun' in London, then?" said Mr. Ruck, with slow
enjoyment.

That last excursion took us along the causeway to Beeching, and so up
the downs and round almost as far as Steadhurst, home. My moods, as we
went, made a mingled web. By this time I had really grasped the fact
that my uncle had, in plain English, robbed me; the little accumulations
of my mother, six hundred pounds and more, that would have educated me
and started me in business, had been eaten into and was mostly gone
into the unexpected hollow that ought to have been a crest of the Union
Pacific curve, and of the remainder he still gave no account. I was too
young and inexperienced to insist on this or know how to get it, but the
thought of it all made streaks of decidedly black anger in that scheme
of interwoven feelings. And you know, I was also acutely sorry for
him--almost as sorry as I was for my aunt Susan. Even then I had quite
found him out. I knew him to be weaker than myself; his incurable,
irresponsible childishness was as clear to me then as it was on his
deathbed, his redeeming and excusing imaginative silliness. Through some
odd mental twist perhaps I was disposed to exonerate him even at
the cost of blaming my poor old mother who had left things in his
untrustworthy hands.

I should have forgiven him altogether, I believe, if he had been in any
manner apologetic to me; but he wasn't that. He kept reassuring me in
a way I found irritating. Mostly, however, his solicitude was for Aunt
Susan and himself.

"It's these Crises, George," he said, "try Character. Your aunt's come
out well, my boy."

He made meditative noises for a space.

"Had her cry of course,"--the thing had been only too painfully evident
to me in her eyes and swollen face--"who wouldn't? But now--buoyant
again!... She's a Corker.

"We'll be sorry to leave the