It has been proved that the very bones of young animals can be
colored pink, by feeding them on milk so colored."

"There!" said Lady Bassett.

"But no nurse could give your son a color which is not her own. I have
seen the woman; she is only a dark Englishwoman. Her arms were
embrowned by exposure, but her forehead was not brown. Mr. Reginald is
quite another thing. The skin of his body, the white of his eye, the
pupil, all look like a reversion to some Oriental type; and, mark the
coincidence, he has mental peculiarities that point toward the East."

Sir Charles lost patience. "On the contrary," said he, "he talks and
feels just like an English snob, and makes me miserable."

"Oh, as to that, he has picked up vulgar phrases at that farm, and in
your stables; but he never picked up his musical genius in stables and
farms, far less his poetry."

"What poetry?"

"What poetry? Why, did not you hear him? Was it not poetical of a
wounded, fevered boy to beg to be laid by the window, and to say 'Let
me drink the moonshine?' Take down your Homer, and read a thousand
lines haphazard, and see whether you stumble over a thought more
poetical than that. But criticism does not exist: whatever the dead
said was good; whatever the living say is little; as if the dead were a
race apart, and had never been the living, and the living would never
be the dead."

Heaven knows where he was running to now, but Sir Charles stopped him
by conceding that point. "Well you are right: poor child, it was
poetical," and the father's pride predominated, for a moment, over
every other sentiment.

"Yes; but where did it come from? That looks to me a typical idea; I
mean an idea derived, not from his luxurious parents, dwellers in
curtained mansions, but from some out-door and remote ancestor; perhaps
from the Oriental tribe that first colonized Britain; they worshiped
the sun and the moon, no doubt; or perhaps, after all, it only came
from some wandering tribe that passed their lives between the two
lights of heaven, and never set foot in a human dwelling."

"This," said Sir Charles, "is a flattering speculation, but so wild and
romantic that I fear it will lead us to no practical result. I thought
you undertook to advise me. What advice can you build on these cobwebs
of your busy brain?"

"Excuse me, my practical friend," said Rolfe. "I opened my discourse in
three heads. What I see--what I foresee--and what, with diffidence, I
advise. P