e added a wing to the house, he raised fruit and flowers that were
marvels. Grandmother preferred for several years to keep house by
herself, raise chickens and geese, and keep putting by a little of her
very own. They had a choice garden and a soft-eyed Alderney cow, but
Bernard Darcy had surely missed his vocation. He should have been a
scientific farmer.

Baby Jack came to them. He certainly had not inherited the beauty of the
Darcys nor the Beaumanoirs, not even the delicacy of his mother. The
eyes of Irish blue were tinged with gray, his hair inclined to the
warmer tints of chestnut, and now he always kept the curls cropped
short. However, his magnificently shaped head was not disfigured by the
process. He did get terribly freckled and tanned as warm weather came
on, and the hair turned almost red by much bathing and sunshine. A
striking contrast indeed to the handsome, well-dressed Frederic.

When Fred went to the academy he pleaded for Jack to go, and Grandmother
Darcy decided that he should. She had never taken kindly to her son's
rather plebeian occupation. After several years of indifferent success,
Mr. Darcy had accepted a position at the mill, in which, if there was
not so much profit, there were no losses.

Jack was not a student in an intellectual point of view. He did not
care to be a doctor, lawyer, or clergyman, and certainly not a
professor. He would have liked to pack a satchel, and start westward,
prospect for a railroad, gold or silver mine, and live the rugged,
unconventional camp-life. Once he had ventured to suggest this noble
ambition; but his timid mother was startled out of her wits, and his
grandmother said with a sage shake of the head,--

"A rolling stone gathers no moss."

"Grandmother," began Jack argumentatively, "of what real value is the
moss to the stone, except in the picturesque aspect? Do you know that a
great many of these time revered and honored adages are the greatest
humbugs in the world?" asked the audacious young iconoclast. "Who wants
to be a stone or a clod, or even a bit of velvet moss? They go to make
up the world, it is true; but is that narrow, torpid, insensate life any
pattern for human souls and active bodies? I think a man's business in
this world is to find out new channels, to build up, to broaden and
deepen, and somehow to make the world feel that he has been in it. I
can't just explain,"--and his brows knit into a puzzled frown,--"but it
seems to me there