e business,
drawing a small sum quarterly for his sustenance, and still residing
in the humble dwelling which he had occupied when he was a warehouse
porter. In spite of his success he was a sad, silent, morose man,
solitary in his habits, and possessed always of a vague undefined
yearning, a dull feeling of dissatisfaction and of craving which never
abandoned him. Often he would strive with his poor crippled brain to
pierce the curtain which divided him from the past, and to solve the
enigma of his youthful existence, but though he sat many a time by the
fire until his head throbbed with his efforts, John Hardy could never
recall the least glimpse of John Huxford's history.

On one occasion he had, in the interests of the firm, to journey to
Quebec, and to visit the very cork factory which had tempted him to
leave England. Strolling through the workroom with the foreman, John
automatically, and without knowing what he was doing, picked up a square
piece of the bark, and fashioned it with two or three deft cuts of his
penknife into a smooth tapering cork. His companion picked it out of his
hand and examined it with the eye of an expert. "This is not the first
cork which you have cut by many a hundred, Mr. Hardy," he remarked.
"Indeed you are wrong," John answered, smiling; "I never cut one before
in my life." "Impossible!" cried the foreman. "Here's another bit of
cork. Try again." John did his best to repeat the performance, but
the brains of the manager interfered with the trained muscles of the
corkcutter. The latter had not forgotten their cunning, but they needed
to be left to themselves, and not directed by a mind which knew nothing
of the matter. Instead of the smooth graceful shape, he could produce
nothing but rough-hewn clumsy cylinders. "It must have been chance,"
said the foreman, "but I could have sworn that it was the work of an old
hand!"

As the years passed John's smooth English skin had warped and crinkled
until he was as brown and as seamed as a walnut. His hair, too, after
many years of iron-grey, had finally become as white as the winters of
his adopted country. Yet he was a hale and upright old man, and when he
at last retired from the manager-ship of the firm with which he had been
so long connected, he bore the weight of his seventy years lightly and
bravely. He was in the peculiar position himself of not knowing his own
age, as it was impossible for him to do more than guess at how old he
was