fore me. . . . Then I
looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour
that I had laboured to do; and behold all was vanity and vexation of
spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."

He closed the book, saying,

"So shall you find, Nephew, you, and every man in the evil days of age
when you shall say, 'I have no pleasure in them.' Hubert, I am going to
my long home, nor do I grieve. In youth I met with sorrow, for though I
have never told you, I was married then and had one son, a bright boy,
and oh! I loved him and his mother. Then came the plague and took them
both. So having naught left and being by nature one of those who could
wean himself from women, which I fear that you are not, Hubert, noting
all the misery there is in the world and how those who are called noble
whom I hate, grind down the humble and the poor, I turned myself to good
works. Half of all my gains I have given and still give to those who
minister to poverty and sickness; you will find a list of them when I am
gone should you wish to continue the bounty, as to which I do not desire
to bind you in any way. For know, Hubert, that I have left you all that
is mine; the gold and the ships with the movables and chattels to
be your own, but the lands which are the main wealth, for life and
afterwards to be your children's, or if you should die childless, then
to go to certain hospitals where the sick are tended."

Now I would have thanked him, but he waved my words aside and went on:

"You will be a very rich man, Hubert, one of the richest in all London;
yet set not your heart on wealth, and above all do not ape nobility or
strive to climb from the honest class of which you come into the ranks
of those idle and dissolute cut-throats and pick-brains who are called
the great. Lighten their pockets if you will, but do not seek to wear
their silken, scented garments. That is my counsel to you."

He paused a while, picking at the bedclothes as the dying do, and
continued,

"You told me that your mother thought you would be a wanderer, and it
is strange that now my mind should be as hers was in this matter. For
I seem to see you far away amidst war and love and splendour, holding
Wave-Flame aloft as did that Thorgrimmer who begat us. Well, go where
you are called or as occasion drives, though you have much to keep you
at home. I would that you were wed, since marriage is an anchor that few
ships can drag. Yet I am not sure, for