ourg St. Antoine was
certainly an infamy, but one of which the very essence was that
unquestioning acknowledgment of his rank. That the land of his adoption
should have dubbed him Mr. Jussuks--in stolid unconsciousness, too, of
the solecism--was an outrage of a totally different order--an outrage
only to be condoned on the score that an impenetrable insular
_gaucherie_, and not a malicious impertinence, was responsible for it.

Mr. Jussuks had, however, outlived his sense of the injurious
appellation; had outlived much prejudice, the wear of poverty, his memory
of many things, and, very early, his scorn of the plebeian processes that
to the impecunious are a condition of living at all. He was certainly a
man of courageous independence, inasmuch as from the hour of his setting
foot in England--and that was at the outset of the century--he had
controlled his own little fortunes without a hand to help him over the
deep places.

Of his first struggles little is known but this--that for years, turning
to account some small knowledge of draughtsmanship he had acquired, he
found employment in ladies' academies, of which there was a plenitude at
that date in King's Cobb.

That, however, which brought him eventually into a modest prominence--not
only in that same beautiful but indifferently known watering-place (upon
which he had happened, it would appear, fortuitously), but elsewhere and
amongst men of a certain mark--was a discovery--or the practical
application of one--which in its result procured him a definite object in
life, together with the means to pursue it.

Ammonites, and such small geological fry, were to be found by the
thousand in the petrified mud beds of the Cobb region; but it was left to
the ingenuity, aided by good fortune, of the foreigner to unearth from
the flaking and perishing cliffs of lias some of the earliest and finest
specimens of the ichthyo- and plesio-saurus that a past world has yielded
to the naturalists.

Out of these the _emigre_ made money, and so was enabled to pursue and
enlarge upon his researches. Presently he prospered into a competence,
married (poor Mademoiselle Belleville, of the Silver Street Academy, who
died of typhoid at the end of a couple of summers), and so grew into the
kindly old age of the absorbed and gentle naturalist, with his Plancine
budding at his side.

What in all these fifty years had he forgotten? His name, his rank, his
very origin? Much, no doubt. But tha