averse in after years in private
cars. The history of Napoleon Bonaparte has not a Sunday-school moral,
but we can trace therein the results of industry after the future
emperor got started. Industry, and the motto "nil desperandum" lived up
to, and the watchword "thorough," and a torch of unsuspected genius, and
"l'audace, toujours l'audace," and a man may go far in life.

Mr. Humphrey Crewe possessed, as may have been surmised, a dash of all
these gifts. For a summary of his character one would not have used the
phrase (as a contemporary of his remarked) of "a shrinking violet." The
phrase, after all, would have fitted very few great men; genius is sure
of itself, and seeks its peers.

The State capital is an old and beautiful and somewhat conservative
town. Life there has its joys and sorrows and passions, its ambitions,
and heart-burnings, to be sure; a most absorbing novel could be written
about it, and the author need not go beyond the city limits or approach
the state-house or the Pelican Hotel. The casual visitor in that capital
leaves it with a sense of peace, the echo of church bells in his ear,
and (if in winter) the impression of dazzling snow. Comedies do not
necessarily require a wide stage, nor tragedies an amphitheatre for
their enactment.

No casual visitor, for instance, would have suspected from the faces
or remarks of the inhabitants whom he chanced to meet that there was
excitement in the capital over the prospective arrival of Mr. Humphrey
Crewe for the legislative session that winter. Legislative sessions,
be it known, no longer took place in the summer, a great relief to Mr.
Crewe and to farmers in general, who wished to be at home in haying
time.

The capital abounded in comfortable homes and boasted not a dwellings
of larger pretensions. Chief among these was the Duncan house--still so
called, although Mr. Duncan, who built it, had been dead these fifteen
years, and his daughter and heiress, Janet, had married an Italian
Marquis and lived in a Roman palace, rehabilitated by the Duncan money.
Mr. Duncan, it may be recalled by some readers of "Coniston," had been
a notable man in his day, who had married the heiress of the State,
and was president of the Central Railroad, now absorbed in the United
Northeastern. The house was a great square of brick, with a wide
cornice, surrounded by a shaded lawn; solidly built, in the fashion
of the days when rich people stayed at home, with a conservatory