Matthew Wesley flung up his hands. “’Tis a conspiracy of folly!  Upon my professional word, you ought all to be strait-waistcoated!” He glared around, found speech again, and pounced upon Sam.  “A pretty success you’ve made of your father’s ambitions—­you, with your infatuation for that rogue Atterbury, and your born gift of choosing the cold side of favour!  You might have been Freind’s successor, Head Master of Westminster School!  Where’s your chance now?  You’ll not even get the under-mastership, I doubt.  Some country grammar school is your fate—­I see it; and all for lack of sense.  If you lacked learning, lacked piety, lacked—­”

“Excuse me, sir, but these are matters I have no mind to discuss with you.  When Freind retires Nicoll will succeed him, and Nicoll deserves it.  Whether I get Nicoll’s place or no, God will decide, who knows if I deserve it.  Let it rest in His hands.  But when you speak of Bishop Atterbury, and when I think of that great heart breaking in exile, why then, sir, you defeat yourself and steel me against my little destinies by the example of a martyr.”

He said it awkwardly, pulling the while at his bony knuckles; but he said it with a passion which cowed his uncle for the moment, and drew from his mother a startled, almost expectant, look.  Yet she knew that Sam’s eyes could never hold (for her joy and terror) the underlying fire which had shone in her youngest boy’s that morning, and which mastered her—­strong woman though she was—­in her husband’s.  And this was the tragic note in her love for Sam—­the more tragic because never sounded.  Sam had learning, diligence, piety, a completely honest mind; he had never caused her an hour’s reasonable anxiety; only—­to this eldest son she had not transmitted his father’s genius, that one divine spark which the Epworth household claimed for its sons as a birthright.  An exorbitant, a colossal claim!  Yet these Wesleys made it as a matter of course.  Did the father know that one of his sons had disappointed it?  Sam knew, at any rate; and Sam’s mother knew; and each, aware of the other’s knowledge, tried pitifully to ignore it.

Matthew Wesley bounced from his chair, unlocked the glazed doors of a bookcase behind him and pulled forth a small volume.

“Here you have it, sir, ’Maggots:  by a Scholar’—­that’s my brother. ’Poems on Several Subjects never before Handled,’—­that’s the man all over.  You may wager that if any man of sense had ever hit on these subjects, my brother had never come within a mile of ’em.  Listen:  ‘The Grunting of a Hog,’ ‘To my Gingerbread Mistress,’ ‘A Box like an Egg,’ ‘Two Soldiers killing one another for a Groat,’ ‘A Pair of Breeches,’ ’A Cow’s Tail’—­there’s titles for you!  Cow’s tail, indeed!  And here, look you, is the author’s portrait for a frontispiece, with a laurel-wreath in his hair and a maggot in place of a parting!  ‘Maggots’!  He began with ’em and he’ll end with ’em.  Maggots!” He slammed the two covers of the book together and tossed it across the table.