d with contempt, becomes a tyrant. Scorn
it and it serves you blindly. I must _seem_ a rich man before I can
become one. It is my wish that my family appear the family of a rich
man. Economies that are apparent are confessions of failure."

In the first chapters they protested, but Ham swept their protests
intolerantly aside, and as the years went on he piled miracle upon
miracle until every promise of his unsupported egotism had become an
accomplished and undeniable reality. Then they ceased to fear and
trusted implicitly in the star that led him. Gradually they yielded to
the blandishments of the new life and drifted pleasantly before the
breezes of luxury. The man who had been a bearded and Calvinistic
countryman for almost a half-century became in less than a decade an
ease-loving and slothful old gentleman, dapper of appearance, rosy of
face and inclining toward _embonpoint_.

Now it is fundamentally written in the edicts of Truth that a man must
go forward or back, and if his hands hang idle at his sides, he will not
advance. Thomas Standish Burton was born to buffet the storms of his
mountains, and as long as he followed his destiny he could look his
fellow-man in the face with the level eyes of independence. Within his
limitations, he could think wholesomely and soundly. But here he was a
different man, a Samson shorn, and the things which he had first
contemptuously waved aside or accepted with a growl in his throat, he
now welcomed. The hard brown face was rounded and pink and where there
had been rawhide muscles on his torso there was now soft and fatty
flesh; for Tom Burton whom men had accounted a giant of immovable
resolution back there among the forests was, in these days, a gentleman
and wore a gardenia or a carnation in his lapel. It was not originally
his fault. The process of becoming a gentleman had pained and irked him,
but he had a masterful son who could not afford that his father should
wear a shaggy bark, and that masterful son had been suffocating him with
opulence until his powers of resistance had become atrophied.

And the mother, too, had altered, though, in her, the change had been a
sweeter thing. The making of a lady of this remote descendant of
Alexander Hamilton's blood had not been difficult.

Some strains of heredity can awaken from the submerged sleep of relapse
as quickly and keenly as a woodsman throws off the mists of slumber.

Ham had never feared that his mother would revea