to Sir George? was my natural
query. Again there was reticence. The name was the same, but the Greys
were numerous.

The journey wore on. The resource of the steamer's company was to sit
on the upper deck, watch the swollen river with its waifs of uprooted
trees and the banks green with the summer, chatting ourselves
into intimacy. The young blindman made good and very good, and
his guardian, while keeping a lookout on his charge from under his
well-worn traveller's cap, which I now knew had sheltered its owner
in tropic hurricanes and icy Arctic blasts, discussed with me matters
various and widely related. Nearing our journey's end, we sat in the
moonlight, the Mississippi opening placidly before us between hazy
hills. We had grown to be chums, and next morning we were to part. It
was a time for confidences. "Well," said Mr. Grey, "I am going to
get a good look at America, then I mean to return home and go into
Parliament." I suggested there might be difficulties about that.
English elections were uncertain, and how could he be at all sure that
any constituency would want him. "Ah," said he, this time no longer
reticent. "I am going into the House of Lords." "Indeed," said I in
surprise, "and who are you really, Mr. William Grey?" At last he
was outspoken. He was heir to the earldom of Stamford, his uncle the
present earl, a man past eighty, childless, and in infirm health,
must soon lay down the title. He was preparing himself for the
responsibilities of the high position and believed it well to make a
study of America. His father, a younger son, had been a clergyman in
Canada, and he, though with an Oxford training, knew the world outside
of England better than the old home. His direct ancestor was Lord Grey
of Groby, whose father, an earl of Stamford, had been a Parliamentary
commander in the years of the Civil War, and in the century before
that, a flower of the house had been the Lady Jane Grey, who had
perished in her youth on the scaffold, a possible heir to the English
crown. So this _outre_ personage, good-heartedly helping the
blindman to an outing, and in a shy apologetic way getting into touch
with an environment strange to him, was a high-born nobleman fitting
himself for his dignities.

I had before invited Mr. Grey to visit me in St. Louis, for his
seeming helplessness appealed to me from the first. He had met some
hard rebuffs in his American contacts. I thought I might aid him in
making his way. Re