taly. Also on holidays and on Sundays after
mass I rode out of London to visit my uncle's estates where sometimes I
slept a night, and once or twice sailed to Holland or to Calais with his
cargoes.

One day, it was when I had been with him about eighteen months, he said
to me suddenly.

"You plough the field, Hubert, and do not tithe the crop, but live upon
the bounty of the husbandman. Henceforward take as much of it as you
will. I ask no account."

So I found myself rich, though in truth I spent but little, both because
my tastes were simple and it was part of my uncle's policy to make no
show which he said would bring envy on us. From this time forward he
began to withdraw himself from business, the truth being that age took
hold of him and he grew feeble. The highest of the affairs he left to
me, only inquiring of them and giving his counsel from time to time.
Still, because he must do something, he busied himself in the shop
which, as he said, he kept as a trap for the birds, chaffering in
ornaments and furs as though his bread depended upon his earning a gold
piece, and directing the manufacture of beautiful jewels and cups which
he, who was an artist, designed to be made by his skilled and highly
paid workmen, some of whom were foreigners.

"We end where we began," he would say. "A smith was I from my
childhood and a smith I shall die. What a fate for one of the blood of
Thorgrimmer! Yet I am selling you into the same bondage, or so it would
seem. But who knows? Who knows? We design, but God decrees."

It is to be noted that when old men cease from the occupation of their
lives, often enough within a very little time they also cease from life
itself. So it was with my uncle. Day by day he faded till at last at
the beginning of the third winter after I came to him he took to his bed
where he lay growing ever weaker till at length he died in the hour of
the birth of the new year.

To the last his mind remained clear and strong, and never more so than
on the night of his death. That evening after I had eaten I went to his
room as usual and found him reading a beautiful manuscript of the book
of the Wisdom of Solomon that is called Ecclesiastes, a work which he
preferred to all others, since its thoughts were his. "I gathered me
also silver and gold and the peculiar treasures of kings," he read
aloud, whether to himself or to me I knew not, and went on, "So I was
great, and increased more than all that were be