t
rid of. He was, indeed, a man. And now it is all going again--faster
than he made it. He used to take you on his knee and say you would walk
well, because you had a good ankle."

Amaryllis blushed and smoothed her dress with her hands, as if that
would lengthen the skirt and hide the ankles which Richard, the
great-uncle, had admired when she was a child, being a man, but which
her feminine acquaintances told her were heavy.

"Here, put on your hat and scarf; how foolish of you to go out in this
wind without them!" said Mrs. Iden, coming out. She thrust them into
Amaryllis' unwilling hands, and retired indoors again immediately.

"He was the only one of all the family," continued her father, "who
could make money; all the rest could do nothing but spend it. For ten
generations he was the only money-maker and saver, and yet he was as
free and liberal as possible. Very curious, wasn't it?--only one in ten
generations--difficult to understand why none of the others--why----" He
paused, thinking.

Amaryllis, too, was silent, thinking--thinking how easily her papa could
make money, great heaps of money. She was sure he could if he tried,
instead of planting potatoes.

"If only another Richard would rise up like him!" said Iden.

This was a very unreasonable wish, for, having had one genius in the
family, and that, too, in the memory of man, they could not expect
another. Even vast empires rarely produce more than one great man in all
the course of their history. There was but one Caesar in the thousand
years of Rome; Greece never had one as a nation, unless we except
Themistocles, or unless we accept Alexander, who was a Macedonian;
Persia had a Cyrus; there was a Tamerlane somewhere, but few people know
anything of the empire he overshadows with his name; France has had two
mighty warriors, Charlemagne and Napoleon--unfortunate France! As for
ourselves, fortunate islanders! we have never had a great man so
immensely great as to overtop the whole, like Charlemagne in his day.
Fortunate for us, indeed, that it has been so. But the best example to
the point is the case of the immense empire of Russia, which has had one
Peter the Great, and one only. Great-uncle Richard was the Peter the
Great of his family, whose work had been slowly undone by his
successors.

"I wonder whether any of us will ever turn out like Richard," continued
Iden. "No one could deny him long; he had a way of persuading and
convincing people, a