mitted himself to the keeping of an English man-servant--he
did not like to call him his valet, lest the appearance of ostentation
and Anglomania should prejudice him with his business associates. But
somehow the new dignity of his own surroundings seemed to lend something
bordering on probability to the conjecture that this once
acting-governor of New York, Rip Van Dam, might have been one of
Charley's ancestors.

Millard hung this print on one side of the chimney in his apartment, a
chimney that had a pair of andirons and three logs of wood in it. But
whether this or any other chimney in the Graydon Building was fitted to
contain a fire nobody knew; for the building was heated by steam, and no
one had been foolhardy enough to discover experimentally just what would
happen if fire were actually lighted in fireplaces so unrealistic as
these. On the other side of his chimney Charley hung a print of the
storming of Stony Point. One evening, Philip Gouverneur, one of
Millard's new cronies, who was calling on him, asked "Millard, what have
you got that old meeting-house on your wall for?"

"Well, you see," said Millard, with the air of a man but languidly
interested,--your real gentleman always affects to be bored by what he
cares for,--"you see I put it there because it is dedicated to old Rip
Van Dam."

"What do you care for that old cuss?" went on Gouverneur, who, being of
the true blue blood himself, had a fad of making game of the whole race
of ancient worthies.

"I don't really care," said Charley; "but as my mother was a Vandam, she
may have descended from this Rip. I have no documents to prove it."

"Oh, I see. Excuse me for making fun of your forefathers. I say every
mean thing I can think of about mine, but another man's grandfather is
sacred. You see I couldn't help smiling at the meeting-house on one side
and that old-fashioned, bloody bayonet-charge on the other."

"Oh, that's only another case of ancestor," said Millard; "my
great-grandfather was at Stony Point."

"The more fool he," said Gouverneur. "My forefathers, now, contrived to
keep out of bayonet-charges, and shed for their country mostly ink and
oratory, speeches and documents."

Though Philip Gouverneur did not care for ancestors, his mother did. The
one thing that enabled Mrs. Gouverneur to look down on the whole brood
of railway magnates, silver-mine kings, and Standard Oil operators, who,
as she phrased it, "had intruded into New York," w