n of his district included Germans, Irish,
Swedes, Mexicans, and Italians, his nationality mattered little.
Moreover, he had made his own fortune, barring the start his uncle had
given him, and he was an American every inch of him. England was but a
peaceful dream, a vale of the hereafter's rest set at the wrong end of
life. He recalled but one incident of that time, but on that incident
his whole life had hinged.

It was some years now since it had grouped itself, a tableau of gray
ghosts, in his memory, but he invoked it to-day, although it seemed to
have no place in the hot languid morning with that Southern sea hiding
its bitter fruit breaking almost at the feet of this long white
red-tiled Mission whose silver bells had once called hundreds of Indians
to prayer. (They rang with vehemence still, but few responded.)
Nevertheless the memory rose and held him.

His mother, a widow, had kept a little shop in his native village. He
had gone to school since the tender age of five, and had paid more
attention to his books than to the village battle-ground, for he grew
rapidly, and was very delicate until the change to the new world made a
man of him. But he loved his books, the other boys were kind to him, and
altogether he was not ill-pleased with his life when one day his mother
bade him put on his best clothes and come with her to a wedding. He
grumbled disdainfully, for he had an interesting book in his hand; but
he was used to obey his mother; he tumbled into his Sunday clothes and
followed her and other dames to the old stone church at the top of the
village. The daughter of the great family of the neighborhood was to be
married that morning, and all the little girls of John's acquaintance
were dressed in white and had strewn flowers along the main street and
the road beyond as far as the castle gates. He thought it a silly
business and a sinful waste of posies; but in the church-yard he took
his place in the throng with a certain feeling of curiosity.

The bride happened to be one of the beauties of her time; but it was not
so much her beauty that made John stare at her with expanding eyes and
mouth as she drove up in an open carriage, then walked down the long
path from the gate to the church. He had seen beauty before; but never
that look and air of a race far above his own, of light impertinent
pride, never a lissome daintily stepping figure, and a head carried as
if it bore a star rather than a bridal wreath.