his pipe.

"The things we call aristocracies and reigning houses are the last
places to look for masterful men. They began strongly, but they have
been too long in possession. They have been cosseted and comforted and
the devil has gone out of their blood. Don't imagine that I undervalue
descent. It is not for nothing that a great man leaves posterity.
But who is more likely to inherit the fire--the elder son with his
flesh-pots or the younger son with his fortune to find? Just think of
it! All the younger sons of younger sons back through the generations!
We none of us know our ancestors beyond a little way. We all of us
may have kings' blood in our veins. The dago who blacked my boots at
Vancouver may be descended by curious byways from Julius Caesar.

"Think of it!" he cried. "The spark once transmitted may smoulder for
generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will
flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our
eyes and wonder, when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn't
begin there. We tell ourselves that Shakespeare was the son of a
woolpedlar, and Napoleon of a farmer, and Luther of a peasant, and we
hold up our hands at the marvel. But who knows what kings and prophets
they had in their ancestry!"

After that we turned in, and as I lay looking at the frosty stars a
fancy wove itself in my brain. I saw the younger sons carry the royal
blood far down among the people, down even into the kennels of the
outcast. Generations follow, oblivious of the high beginnings, but there
is that in the stock which is fated to endure. The sons and daughters
blunder and sin and perish, but the race goes on, for there is a fierce
stuff of life in it. It sinks and rises again and blossoms at haphazard
into virtue or vice, since the ordinary moral laws do not concern its
mission. Some rags of greatness always cling to it, the dumb faith that
sometime and somehow that blood drawn from kings it never knew will be
royal again. Though nature is wasteful of material things, there is no
waste of spirit And then after long years there comes, unheralded and
unlooked-for, the day of the Appointed Time....

This is the story which grew out of that talk by the winter fire.

CHAPTER I. HIGHTOWN UNDER SUNFELL

When Biorn was a very little boy in his father's stead at Hightown he
had a play of his own making for the long winter nights. At the back end
of the hall, where the men s