his day the island was not a
scene of overmuch gaiety. If the memory of old men can be trusted, he
contrived to keep a swashbuckler court there, but its festivities,
like his own dignities, must have been maimed and lame. He did not
care to see too much of it, and that he might be free to go where he
would he appointed a deputy governor.

Now when he looked about him for this deputy he found just six and
twenty persons ready to fall at his feet. He might have had either of
the Deemsters, but he selected neither; he might have had any of the
twenty-four Keys, but he selected none. It was then that he heard of
a plain farmer in the north of the island, who was honored for his
uprightness, beloved for his simplicity, and revered for his piety.
"The very man for me," thought the lord of the swashbucklers, and he
straightway set off to see him.

He found him living like a patriarch among his people, surrounded by
his sons, and proud of them that they were many and strong. His name
was Adam Fairbrother. In his youth he had run away to sea, been taken
prisoner by the Algerines, kept twenty-eight months a slave in
Barbary, had escaped and returned home captain of a Guineaman. This
had been all his education and all his history. He had left the
island a wild, headstrong, passionate lad; he had returned to it a
sober, patient, gentle-hearted man.

Adam's house was Lague, a loose, straggling, featureless and
irresolute old fabric, on five hundred hungry acres of the rocky
headland of Maughold. When the Duke rode up to it Adam himself was
ringing the bell above the door lintel that summoned his people to
dinner. He was then in middle life, stout, yet flaccid and slack,
with eyes and forehead of sweetest benevolence, mouth of softest
tenderness, and hair already whitening over his ears and temples.

"The face of an angel in homespun," thought the Duke.

Adam received his visitor with the easy courtesy of an equal, first
offering his hand. The Duke shook hands with him. He held the stirrup
while the Duke alighted, took the horse to the stable, slackened its
girths, and gave it a feed of oats, talking all the time. The Duke
stepped after him and listened. Then he led the way to the house. The
Duke followed. They went into the living room--an oblong kitchen with
an oak table down the middle, and two rows of benches from end to
end. The farming people were trooping in, bringing with them the odor
of fresh peat and soil. Bowls of