d their devastated,
blood-drenched fields to the mainland, in the hope of finding, in the
domain of the conquered enemy, cities and farms which would replace
those they had lost.

The learned professor assumes that while a long-continued war had
strengthened rather than weakened the instinct of paternal devotion, it
had also dulled other humanitarian instincts, and raised to the first
magnitude the law of the survival of the fittest, with the result that
when the exodus took place the strong, the intelligent, and the
cunning, together with their offspring, crossed the waters of the
Channel or the North Sea to the continent, leaving in unhappy England
only the helpless inmates of asylums for the feebleminded and insane.

My objections to this, that the present inhabitants of England are
mentally fit, and could therefore not have descended from an ancestry
of undiluted lunacy he brushes aside with the assertion that insanity
is not necessarily hereditary; and that even though it was, in many
cases a return to natural conditions from the state of high
civilization, which is thought to have induced mental disease in the
ancient world, would, after several generations, have thoroughly
expunged every trace of the affliction from the brains and nerves of
the descendants of the original maniacs.

Personally, I do not place much stock in Professor Cortoran's theory,
though I admit that I am prejudiced. Naturally one does not care to
believe that the object of his greatest affection is descended from a
gibbering idiot and a raving maniac.

But I am forgetting the continuity of my narrative--a continuity which
I desire to maintain, though I fear that I shall often be led astray,
so numerous and varied are the bypaths of speculation which lead from
the present day story of the Grabritins into the mysterious past of
their forbears.

As I stood talking with the girl I presently recollected that she still
was bound, and with a word of apology, I drew my knife and cut the
rawhide thongs which confined her wrists at her back.

She thanked me, and with such a sweet smile that I should have been
amply repaid by it for a much more arduous service.

"And now," I said, "let me accompany you to your home and see you
safely again under the protection of your friends."

"No," she said, with a hint of alarm in her voice; "you must not come
with me--Buckingham will kill you."

Buckingham. The name was famous in ancient English histor