cefully engaged on the task which had been
nightly with him at this hour for twenty-five years,--the writing of his
diary, in a shorthand which he wrote with a neatness, almost a
daintiness, that always marked his use of pen and ink, and gave to his
merely commercial correspondence and his quite exquisitely kept
accounts, a certain touch of the scholar,--again an air of distinction
in excess of, and unaccounted for, by the nature of the interests which
it dignified.

His somewhat narrow range of reading, had you followed it by his careful
markings through those bound volumes of sermons in the bookcase, bore
the same evidence of inherited and inadequately occupied refinement. His
life from boyhood had been too much of a struggle to leave him much
leisure for reading, and such as he had enjoyed had been diverted into
evangelical channels by the influence of a certain pious old lady, with
whom as a young man he had boarded, and for whose memory all his life
he cherished a reverence little short of saint-worship.

The name of Mrs. Quiggins, whose portrait had still a conspicuous niche
among the _lares_ of the household,--a little thin silvery old
widow-lady, suggesting great sadness, much gentleness, and a little
severity,--had thus become for the family of James Mesurier a symbol of
sanctity, with which a properly accredited saint of the calendar could
certainly not, in that Protestant home, have competed. It was she who
had given him that little well-worn Bible which lay on the table with
his letters and papers, as he wrote under the lamplight, and than which
a world full of sacred relics contains none more sacred. A business-like
elastic band encircled its covers, as a precaution against pages
becoming loose with much turning; and inside you would have found
scarcely a chapter unpencilled,--texts underlined, and sermons of
special helpfulness noted by date and preacher on the margin,--the
itinerary of a devout human soul on its way through this world to
the next.

The Bible and the sermons of a certain famous Nonconformist Divine of
the day were James Mesurier's favourite and practically his only
reading, at this time; though as a young man he had picked up a fair
education for himself, and had taken a certain interest in modern
history. For novels he had not merely disapproval, but absolutely no
taste. Once in a specially genial mood he had undertaken to try
"Ivanhoe," to please his favourite daughter,--this night in