tcy, and to the Vyell
acres, which were mostly entailed.

But the grave itself could not give lessons in greed to a true Whig
family of that period. Lady Jane had it in her blood, every tradition
of it. Her son (though within a few months he rose to command of a
troop) detested all military routine save active service. He despised
the triumphs of the Senate. To keep him out of mischief--or, rather, as
you shall hear, to extricate him from it--the good dame made application
to the Duke of Newcastle; and so in the year 1737, at the age of
twenty-one, Captain Oliver Vyell was appointed to the lucrative post of
Collector to the port of Boston.

He had held it, now, for close upon seven years.

Chapter VII.

A SABBATH-BREAKER.

Now, in his twenty-eighth year, Oliver Vyell, handsome of face, standing
six feet two inches in his stockings, well built and of iron
constitution, might fairly be called a sensual man, but not fairly a
sensualist. The distinction lay in his manliness. He was a man, every
inch of him.

He enjoyed hard riding even more than hard gaming, and far more than
hard drinking; courted fatigue as a form of bodily indulgence; would
tramp from twenty to thirty miles in any weather on a chance of sport;
loved the bite of the wind, the shock of cold water; and was a bold
swimmer in a generation that shunned the exercise.

He awoke next morning to find the sun shining in on his window after a
boisterous night. He looked at his watch and rang a small bell that
stood on the table by his bed. Within ten seconds Manasseh appeared,
and was commanded first to draw up the blind and then, though the hour
was early, to bring shaving-water with all speed.

While the negro went on his errand Captain Vyell arose, slipped on his
dressing-gown, and strolled to the window. It looked upon the ocean,
over a clean stretch of beach that ran north-west, starting from the
pier-head of the harbour and fringing the town's outskirt. Half a dozen
houses formed this outskirt or suburb--decent weather-boarded houses
standing in their own gardens along a curved cliff overlooking the
beach. The beach was of hardest sand, and just beneath the Collector's
window so level that it served for a second bowling-green, or
ten-pin-alley. Thus it ran out for some twenty rods and then shelved
abruptly. Captain Vyell, who had an eye for such phenomena, judged that
this bank had formed itself quite recently, since the building