The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Uncle Of An Angel, by Thomas A. Janvier

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Title: The Uncle Of An Angel
1891

Author: Thomas A. Janvier

Illustrator: W. T. Smedley

Release Date: December 10, 2007 [EBook #23807]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNCLE OF AN ANGEL ***

Produced by David Widger

THE UNCLE OF AN ANGEL

By Thomas A. Janvier

Copyright, 1891, by Harper & Brothers

[Illustration: Frontispiece 007 p60]

[Illustration: Page 3 020]

I.

When Mr. Hutchinson. Port, a single gentleman who admitted that he was
forty-seven years old and who actually was rising sixty, of strongly
fixed personal habits, and with the most positive opinions upon every
conceivable subject, came to know that by the death of his widowed
sister he had been placed in the position of guardian of that sister's
only daughter, Dorothy, his promptly formed and tersely expressed
conception of the situation was that the agency by which it had been
brought about was distinctively diabolical. The fact may be added that
during the subsequent brief term of his guardianship Mr. Port found no
more reason for reversing this hastily formed opinion than did the late
King David for reversing his hastily expressed views in regard to the
general tendency of mankind towards untruthfulness.

The two redeeming features of Mr. Port's trying situation were that his
duties as a guardian did not begin at all until his very unnecessary
ward was nearly nineteen years old; and did not begin actively--his
ward having elected to remain in France for a season, under the mild
direction of the elderly cousin who had been her mother's travelling
companion--until she was almost twenty. When she was one-and-twenty, as
Mr. Port reflected with much satisfaction, he would be rid of her.

Neither by nature nor by education had Mr. Hutchinson Port been fitted
to discharge the duties which thus were thrust upon him. His
disposition was introspective--but less in a philosophical sense than a
physiological, for the central point of his introspection was his
liver. That he made something of a fetich of this organ will not app