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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
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