en sense of what he considered justice. The Government had
dealt very kindly with him in consideration of his youth and of his
father's services, and had merely dropped him down.

This to a young man like Heron was simply killing with kindness. He
could have stood up stoutly against impeachment, trial, punishment, any
manner of exciting ordeal, and commanded his brave heart to bear it. But
to be quietly allowed to go his way was intolerable, and, being accused
of nothing, he was rushing back to England to insist on being accused of
something. A chief of any kind in a small dependency is a person of
overwhelming greatness and importance in his own sphere. Every eye there
is literally on him. He diffuses even a sort of impression as if he were
a good deal too large for his sphere, like the helmet of such portentous
size in the courtyard of Otranto. To come down all at once to be an
ordinary passenger to England, an ordinary "No. 257, au 3me" at the
Hotel du Louvre in Paris, an obscure personage getting out at the
Charing Cross station and calling a hansom, nobody caring whence he has
come, or capable, even after elaborate reminder, of calling to memory
his story, his grievance, or his identity--this is something to try the
soul of a patient man. Mr. Heron was not patient.

He was a young Quixote out of time and place. He never could let
anything alone. He could not see a grievance without trying to set it
right. The impression that anybody was being wronged or cheated affected
and tormented him as keenly as a discordant note or an inharmonious
arrangement of colors might disturb persons of loftier artistic soul. In
the colonies queer old ideas survive long after they have died out of
England, and the traveller from the parent country comes often on some
ancient abstraction there as he might upon some old-fashioned garment.
Heron started into life with a full faith in the living reality of
divers abstractions which people in England have long since dissected,
analyzed, and thrown away. He believed in and spoke of progress, and
humanity, and brotherhood, and such like vaguenesses as if they were
real things to work for and love. People who regard abstractions as
realities are just the very persons who turn solid and commonplace
realities into shining and splendid abstractions. Young Heron regarded
England not as an island with a bad climate, where some millions of
florid men made money or worked for it, but as a sort of div