d of how he
happened to be. He had come of no petty love-match. He had come of
lofty conception of duty and of devotion to a cause. His father had not
married for love. Love was a madness that had never perturbed Isaac
Ford. When he answered the call to go to the heathen with the message of
life, he had had no thought and no desire for marriage. In this they
were alike, his father and he. But the Board of Missions was economical.
With New England thrift it weighed and measured and decided that married
missionaries were less expensive per capita and more efficacious. So the
Board commanded Isaac Ford to marry. Furthermore, it furnished him with
a wife, another zealous soul with no thought of marriage, intent only on
doing the Lord's work among the heathen. They saw each other for the
first time in Boston. The Board brought them together, arranged
everything, and by the end of the week they were married and started on
the long voyage around the Horn.

Percival Ford was proud that he had come of such a union. He had been
born high, and he thought of himself as a spiritual aristocrat. And he
was proud of his father. It was a passion with him. The erect, austere
figure of Isaac Ford had burned itself upon his pride. On his desk was a
miniature of that soldier of the Lord. In his bedroom hung the portrait
of Isaac Ford, painted at the time when he had served under the Monarchy
as prime minister. Not that Isaac Ford had coveted place and worldly
wealth, but that, as prime minister, and, later, as banker, he had been
of greater service to the missionary cause. The German crowd, and the
English crowd, and all the rest of the trading crowd, had sneered at
Isaac Ford as a commercial soul-saver; but he, his son, knew different.
When the natives, emerging abruptly from their feudal system, with no
conception of the nature and significance of property in land, were
letting their broad acres slip through their fingers, it was Isaac Ford
who had stepped in between the trading crowd and its prey and taken
possession of fat, vast holdings. Small wonder the trading crowd did not
like his memory. But he had never looked upon his enormous wealth as his
own. He had considered himself God's steward. Out of the revenues he
had built schools, and hospitals, and churches. Nor was it his fault
that sugar, after the slump, had paid forty per cent; that the bank he
founded had prospered into a railroad; and that, among other