him in any way; but if he
left, always to keep an eye on him, and stand ready to produce him on
demand. To these things, and particularly to absolute secrecy, Tim was
sworn by the most awful of oaths; and so he and his master parted. A
week later a carriage was driven up to Tim's residence in the dead of
the night, and a small bundle of caterwauling humankind was transferred
from the one to the other. Such was the beginning of the life of young
Queed. The woman, his mother, had died a day or two before, and where
she had been buried Tim had no idea.

So the years passed, while the Queeds watched with amazement the subtly
expanding verification of the adage that blood will tell. For Mr.
Surface, said Tim, had been a great scholard, and used to sit up to all
hours reading books that Thomason, the butler, couldn't make head nor
tail of; and so with Surface's boy. He was the strange duckling among
chickens who, with no guidance, straightway plumed himself for the seas
of printed knowledge. Time rolled on. When Surface was released from
prison, as the papers announced, there occurred not the smallest change
in the status of affairs; except that the monthly remittances now bore
the name of Nicolovius, and came from Chicago or some other city in the
west. More years passed; and at last, one day, after a lapse of nearly a
quarter of a century, the unexpected happened, as it really will
sometimes. Tim got a letter in a handwriting he knew well, instructing
him to call next day at such-and-such a time and place.

Tim was not disobedient to the summons. He called; and found, instead of
the dashing young master he had once known, a soft and savage old man
whom he at first utterly failed to recognize. Surface paced the floor
and spoke his mind. It seemed that an irresistible impulse had led him
back to his old home city; that he had settled and taken work there; and
there meant to end his days. Under these circumstances, some deep-hidden
instinct--a whim, the old man called it--had put it into his head to
consider the claiming and final acknowledgment of his son. After all the
Ishmaelitish years of bitterness and wandering, Surface's blood, it
seemed, yearned for his blood. But under no circumstances, he told Tim,
would he acknowledge his son before his death, since that would involve
the surrender of his incognito; and not even then, so the old man swore,
unless he happened to be pleased with the youth--the son of his body
whom he