ny measure of good management, would
have been a blessing to all. But Micky had gone too far. His original
weak good-nature was foundered in rum. Always blustery and frothy, he
divided the world in two--superior officers, before whom he grovelled,
and inferiors to whom he was a mouthy, foul-tongued, contemptible bully,
in spite of a certain lingering kindness of heart that showed itself at
such rare times when he was neither roaring drunk nor crucified by black
reaction. His brother's child, fortunately, had inherited little of the
paternal family traits, but in both body and brain favoured his mother,
the daughter of a learned divine who had spent unusual pains on her book
education, but had left her penniless and incapable of changing that
condition.

Her purely mental powers and peculiarities were such that, a hundred
years before, she might have been burned for a witch, and fifty years
later might have been honoured as a prophetess. But she missed the crest
of the wave both ways and fell in the trough; her views on religious
matters procured neither a witch's grave nor a prophet's crown, but a
sort of village contempt.

The Bible was her standard--so far so good--but she emphasized the wrong
parts of it. Instead of magnifying the damnation of those who follow not
the truth (as the village understood it), she was content to semi-quote:

"Those that are not against me are with me," and "A kind heart is the
mark of His chosen." And then she made a final utterance, an echo really
of her father: "If any man do anything sincerely, believing that thereby
he is worshipping God, he is worshipping God."

Then her fate was sealed, and all who marked the blazing eyes, the
hollow cheeks, the yet more hollow chest and cough, saw in it all the
hand of an offended God destroying a blasphemer, and shook their heads
knowingly when the end came.

So Rolf was left alone in life, with a common school education, a
thorough knowledge of the Bible and of "Robinson Crusoe," a vague
tradition of God everywhere, and a deep distrust of those who should
have been his own people.

The day of the little funeral he left the village of Redding to tramp
over the unknown road to the unknown south where his almost unknown
Uncle Michael had a farm and, possibly, a home for him.

Fifteen miles that day, a night's rest in a barn, twenty-five miles the
next day, and Rolf had found his future home.

"Come in, lad," was the not unfriendly reception