f life; still, it was natural to hunt them up, to
seek in their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and
perhaps--such is our vanity in the new lands--to show them what the
stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing these visits:
the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to
have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping,
trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and
mind, which somehow one didn't see much over home.

"England," said Poulton, the Canadian-born, "is a dangerous country to
live in; you run such risks of growing old." They agreed, I fear, for
more reasons than this that England was a good country to leave early;
and you cannot blame them--there was not one of them who did not offer
in his actual person proof of what he said. Their own dividing chance
grew dramatic in their eyes.

"I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before I sailed,"
said McGill. "Great Scott, if I'd taken that clerkship!" He saw all his
glorious past, I suppose, in a suburban aspect.

"I was kicked out," said Cameron, "and it was the kindest attention my
father ever paid me;" and Bates remarked that it was worth coming out
second-class, as he did, to go back in the best cabin in the ship.

The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind them prompted
them to this kind of congratulation, with just a thought of compunction
at the back of it for their own better fortunes. In the further
spectacle of England most of them saw the repository of singularly
old-fashioned ideas the storehouse of a good deal of money; and the
market for unlimited produce. They looked cautiously at imperial
sentiment; they were full of the terms of their bargain and had, as they
would have said, little use for schemes that did not commend themselves
on a basis of common profit. Cruickshank was the biggest and the best of
them; but even Cruickshank submitted the common formulas; submitted them
and submitted to them.

Only Lorne Murchison among them looked higher and further; only he was
alive to the inrush of the essential; he only lifted up his heart.

CHAPTER XVI

Lorne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members of the
deputation, as their business progressed, began to feel less like atoms
and more like a body exerting an influence, however obscurely hid in
a temperance hotel, upon the tide of international affairs; but