ry start without the
slightest conception of what the game really was and why they were
playing it? But it is quite obvious now to anyone looking back over the
years that had the cards of his life been shuffled by his Auntie Gracie
before her elopement to the Klondyke with Ex-Senator Fortescue, the
ultimate stakes would have been immeasurably dissimilar. At this time
the harsh political spirit of Guffle Hoe was morally if not physically
and perhaps mentally inflamed by the appearance of several tramp
steamers in the mouth of the Sippe, a new hay-cart at Oozeworthy Farm,
and the flashing of the electrifying news across the newly erected
telegraph wires that Peter Rotepillar and Henry Plugg had, apart from
their dramatic refusal to enter themselves as candidates for the
Presidency, declined to take any further interest in politics at all and
had set up a flourishing bee nursery in Bokewood, Mass. This was on a
Friday. Rupert was two months old and naturally sensitive--living and
sometimes breathing in such a political atmosphere--to the far-reaching
effects of such a shattering blow to the constituency. Of all this that
was being performed to complicate his education he became suddenly
conscious of an innate sense of the roundness of the whole universe. He
began to find himself continually oppressed by the protuberant nearness
and corresponding magnitude of his mother's face, which grafted itself
upon his infant psychology by looming with maddening regularity over his
cot and consciousness. The peculiar rotundity of this good woman's
countenance seemed to illustrate to the rising sun of his genius the
ethics of that science at which--had he but lived seventy years
later--he might have become so famous:--Geography.

On September 9th, 1871, he developed croup, which in due course promoted
him to one of the first steps of artistic education--Colour.

For several days he hung between life and death, turning an exquisite
shade of purple and black as each new coughing fit seized him. This not
unusual phenomenon impressed its vivid seal upon the plastic wax of his
unfledged memories with extraordinary precision. In after life, for a
long while, he was quite unable to gaze at an ordinary muscat grape or a
coal-scuttle without either biting his comforter right through or being
extremely sick. Naturally this disability coupled with the physical
weakness and sense of impotence that he invariably experienced when in
the company of h