they would not even write to poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his fresco away.  Phew!” continued he, waxing warm, “if old Pontifex had had Cromwell’s chances he would have done all that Cromwell did, and have done it better; if he had had Giotto’s chances he would have done all that Giotto did, and done it no worse; as it was, he was a village carpenter, and I will undertake to say he never scamped a job in the whole course of his life.”

“But,” said I, “we cannot judge people with so many ‘ifs.’  If old Pontifex had lived in Giotto’s time he might have been another Giotto, but he did not live in Giotto’s time.”

“I tell you, Edward,” said my father with some severity, “we must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do.  If a man has done enough either in painting, music or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough.  It is not by what a man has actually put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts which he has set down, so to speak, upon the canvas of his life that I will judge him, but by what he makes me feel that he felt and aimed at.  If he has made me feel that he felt those things to be loveable which I hold loveable myself I ask no more; his grammar may have been imperfect, but still I have understood him; he and I are en rapport; and I say again, Edward, that old Pontifex was not only an able man, but one of the very ablest men I ever knew.”

Against this there was no more to be said, and my sisters eyed me to silence.  Somehow or other my sisters always did eye me to silence when I differed from my father.

“Talk of his successful son,” snorted my father, whom I had fairly roused.  “He is not fit to black his father’s boots.  He has his thousands of pounds a year, while his father had perhaps three thousand shillings a year towards the end of his life.  He is a successful man; but his father, hobbling about Paleham Street in his grey worsted stockings, broad brimmed hat and brown swallow-tailed coat was worth a hundred of George Pontifexes, for all his carriages and horses and the airs he gives himself.”

“But yet,” he added, “George Pontifex is no fool either.”  And this brings us to the second generation of the Pontifex family with whom we need concern ourselves.

CHAPTER II

Old Mr Pontifex had married in the year 1750, but for fifteen years his wife bore no children.  At the end of that time Mrs Pontifex astonished the whole village by showing unmistakable signs of a disposition to present her husband with an heir or heiress.  Hers had long ago been considered a hopeless case, and when on consulting the doctor concerning the meaning of certain symptoms she was informed of their significance, she became very angry and abused the doctor roundly for talking nonsense.  She refused to put so much