with two heads, and its talons resting upon two gates of Rome and Constantinople, with (for difference) a crescent between the gates, and over all an imperial crown.  In truth this exile buried by Tamar drew his blood direct from the loins of the great Byzantine emperors, through that Thomas of whom Mahomet II. said, “I have found many slaves in Peloponnesus, but this man only:”  and from Theodore, through his second son John, came the Constantines of Constantine—­albeit with a bar sinister, of which my father made small account.  I believe he held privately that a Constantine, de stirpe imperatorum, had no call to concern himself with petty ceremonies of this or that of the Church’s offshoots to legitimize his blood.  At any rate no bar sinister appeared on the imperial escutcheon repeated, with quarterings of Arundel, Mohun, Grenville, Nevile, Archdeckne, Courtney, and, again, Arundel, on the wainscots and in the windows of Constantine, usually with the legend Dabit Devs His Qvoqve Finem, but twice or thrice with a hopefuller one, Generis revocemvs honores.

Knowing him to be thus descended, you could recognize in all my father said or did a large simplicity as of the earlier gods, and a dignity proper to a king as to a beggar, but to no third and mean state.  A child might beard him, but no man might venture a liberty with him or abide the rare explosions of his anger.  You might even, upon long acquaintance, take him for a great, though mad, Englishman, and trust him as an Englishman to the end; but the soil of his nature was that which grows the vine—­volcanic, breathing through its pores a hidden heat to answer the sun’s.  Whether or no there be in man a faith to remove mountains, there is in him (and it may come to the same thing) a fire to split them, and anon to clothe the bare rock with tendrils and soft-scented blooms.

In person my father stood six feet five inches tall, and his shoulders filled a doorway.  His head was large and shapely, and he carried it with a very noble poise; his face a fine oval, broad across the brow and ending in a chin at once delicate and masterful; his nose slightly aquiline; his hair—­and he wore his own, tied with a ribbon—­of a shining white.  His cheeks were hollow and would have been cadaverous but for their hue, a sanguine brown, well tanned by out-of-door living.  His eyes, of an iron-grey colour, were fierce or gentle as you took him, but as a rule extraordinarily gentle.  He would walk you thirty miles any day without fatigue, and shoot you a woodcock against any man; but as an angler my uncle Gervase beat him.