But he had a son, and the son had a head on his shoulders a magnificent head that boy had.  Mr. Horace Jewdwine had noticed it the first minute he came into the shop.  And the magnificence of Keith’s head had been pointed out to Isaac long before that, when Keith couldn’t have been more than ten—­why, nine he was; that was the beginning of it.  Isaac could remember how Sir Joseph Harden of Lazarus, the great scholar, who was one of Isaac’s best customers, poking round the little dingy shop in Paternoster Row (it was all second-hand in those days), came on the young monkey perched on the step-ladder, reading Homer.  Sir Joseph had made him come down and translate for him then and there.  And Keith went at it, translating for twenty minutes straight on end.  Sir Joseph had said nothing, but he asked him what he was going to be, and the young Turk grinned up at him and said he was going to be a poet, “like ’Omer, that was what he was going to be.”  Isaac had said that was just like his impudence, but Sir Joseph stood there looking at him and smiling on the side of his face that Keith couldn’t see, and he told the little chap to “work hard and mind his rough breathings.”  Isaac had supposed that was some sort of a joke, for Keith, he tried hard to grin, though his face went red hot all over.  Then Sir Joseph had turned round very serious and asked if he, Rickman, had any other sons, because, whatever he did with the rest of them, he must make this one a scholar.  Isaac had said No, he hadn’t any but that one boy, and he would have to be brought up to the business.  He was afraid he couldn’t spare the time to make much of a scholar of him.  Time, said Isaac, was money.  What Sir Joseph said then Isaac had never forgotten.  He had said; “True, time was money, loose cash in your pockets; but brains were capital.”  And there wasn’t a better investment for them, he had added, than a good sound classical education.  Isaac was to send the boy to the City of London, then to the London University, if he couldn’t rise to Oxford; but Sir Joseph’s advice was Oxford.  Let him try for a scholarship.  He added that he would like to do something for him later on if he lived.  Isaac had never forgotten it; his memory being assisted by the circumstance that Sir Joseph had that very same day bought one hundred and twenty-five pounds’ worth of books for his great library down in Devonshire.

The boy was sent to an “Academy,” then to the City of London; Isaac had not risen to Oxford.  Keith never tried for a scholarship, and if he had, Isaac would have drawn the line at a university education, as tending towards an unholy leisure and the wisdom of this world.  Otherwise he had spared no expense, for he had grasped the fact that this was an investment, and he looked to have his money back again with something like fifty per cent. interest.  And the boy, the boy was to come back, too, with a brain as bright as steel, all its queer little complicated parts in working order; in short, a superb machine; and Isaac would only have to touch a spring to set it going.