of the life
of the Maritime Provinces and the sturdy temper of the people. I suppose
there are no people in the world who hate luxury and extravagance and
that sort of thing quite as much as the Maritime Province people, and,
of them, no one hated luxury more than Pupkin senior.

Don't mistake the man. He wore a long sealskin coat in winter, yes; but
mark you, not as a matter of luxury, but merely as a question of his
lungs. He smoked, I admit it, a thirty-five cent cigar, not because he
preferred it, but merely through a delicacy of the thorax that made it
imperative. He drank champagne at lunch, I concede the point, not in
the least from the enjoyment of it, but simply on account of a peculiar
affection of the tongue and lips that positively dictated it. His own
longing--and his wife shared it--was for the simple, simple life--an
island somewhere, with birds and trees. They had bought three or four
islands--one in the St. Lawrence, and two in the Gulf, and one off the
coast of Maine--looking for this sort of thing. Pupkin senior often said
that he wanted to have some place that would remind him of the little
old farm up the Aroostook where he was brought up. He often bought
little old farms, just to try them, but they always turned out to be so
near a city that he cut them into real estate lots, without even having
had time to look at them.

But--and this is where the emphasis lay--in the matter of luxury for his
only son, Peter, Pupkin senior was a Maritime Province man right to the
core, with all the hardihood of the United Empire Loyalists ingrained in
him. No luxury for that boy! No, sir! From his childhood, Pupkin senior
had undertaken, at the least sign of luxury, to "tan it out of him,"
after the fashion still in vogue in the provinces. Then he sent him to
an old-fashioned school to get it "thumped out of him," and after that
he had put him for a year on a Nova Scotia schooner to get it "knocked
out of him." If, after all that, young Pupkin, even when he came to
Mariposa, wore cameo pins and daffodil blazers, and broke out into
ribbed silk saffron ties on pay day, it only shows that the old Adam
still needs further tanning even in the Maritime Provinces.

Young Pupkin, of course, was to have gone into law. That was his
father's cherished dream and would have made the firm Pupkin, Pupkin,
Pupkin, and Pupkin, as it ought to have been. But young Peter was kept
out of the law by the fool system of examinations d