, and knew how to turn out a pair of shoes from the raw
leather. The wages will be small at first. Some of the duties are
disagreeable, many of the requirements exacting, but promotion is
rapid, and probably by the end of the year you'd be in the office,
learning to take an oversight of the different departments; that is,
if you had proved there was good stuff in you. If money is what you
are after, this opening is better a thousand times than anything the
village bank could give you in years, and in my opinion it's just as
respectable a calling to handle leather as lucre. You'll have to work
and work hard."

"I don't mind how hard the work is," answered Alec. "I hate to give
up the one thing that has been my ambition all my life, but I have
come to the point where I'd do anything honest to get a place
somewhere out of this town. I'd even scrub floors. You don't know
what I've been through this summer, Uncle Dick. Of course, you know
about my father?"

He asked the question with such bitterness of tone that his listener
scanned his face intently, then sympathetically.

"Well, I must get away from that," Alec continued. "It's an awful
handicap. The thought of it made me desperate at times. If they
should hear about him in Salesbury and turn me down on his
account--well, I'd just give up! I couldn't stand any more than I
have already suffered on his account."

There was no answer for a minute, then the deep voice answered,
cheerily: "Alec, your grandmother Macklin once told me that when she
was a very small child she went to visit her grandmother; quite a
remote ancestor of yours that would be, wouldn't it? For some reason,
she was put to sleep in a trundle-bed in the old lady's room, and
along late in the night she was awakened by a very earnest voice. She
sat up in the little trundle-bed to listen, and there was the old
saint on her knees, praying for--now, what do you suppose? For 'all
her posterity to the latest generation!' She said she didn't
understand then what the words meant, but years afterward, when she
held her first baby in her arms, they came back to her with a feeling
of awe, to think that prayers uttered for him, long years before he
was born, were still working to his blessing.

"It is the same with you, Alec. Evil influences were set afloat by
your father's crime that will undoubtedly work against you many a
time, but you must remember all the good that lies on the other hand
to counteract them.