“Fish in my net, goldfish in my net!  See how they shine who presently must wriggle on the shore.  Vanity of vanities!  All is vanity, and doubtless Solomon knew such in his day.”

Hard I worked, and ever harder, toiling at the mill of all these large affairs and keeping myself in health during such time as I could spare by shooting at the butts with my big bow where I found that none could beat me, or practising sword play in a school of arms that was kept by a master of the craft from Italy.  Also on holidays and on Sundays after mass I rode out of London to visit my uncle’s estates where sometimes I slept a night, and once or twice sailed to Holland or to Calais with his cargoes.

One day, it was when I had been with him about eighteen months, he said to me suddenly.

“You plough the field, Hubert, and do not tithe the crop, but live upon the bounty of the husbandman.  Henceforward take as much of it as you will.  I ask no account.”

So I found myself rich, though in truth I spent but little, both because my tastes were simple and it was part of my uncle’s policy to make no show which he said would bring envy on us.  From this time forward he began to withdraw himself from business, the truth being that age took hold of him and he grew feeble.  The highest of the affairs he left to me, only inquiring of them and giving his counsel from time to time.  Still, because he must do something, he busied himself in the shop which, as he said, he kept as a trap for the birds, chaffering in ornaments and furs as though his bread depended upon his earning a gold piece, and directing the manufacture of beautiful jewels and cups which he, who was an artist, designed to be made by his skilled and highly paid workmen, some of whom were foreigners.

“We end where we began,” he would say.  “A smith was I from my childhood and a smith I shall die.  What a fate for one of the blood of Thorgrimmer!  Yet I am selling you into the same bondage, or so it would seem.  But who knows?  Who knows?  We design, but God decrees.”

It is to be noted that when old men cease from the occupation of their lives, often enough within a very little time they also cease from life itself.  So it was with my uncle.  Day by day he faded till at last at the beginning of the third winter after I came to him he took to his bed where he lay growing ever weaker till at length he died in the hour of the birth of the new year.

To the last his mind remained clear and strong, and never more so than on the night of his death.  That evening after I had eaten I went to his room as usual and found him reading a beautiful manuscript of the book of the Wisdom of Solomon that is called Ecclesiastes, a work which he preferred to all others, since its thoughts were his.  “I gathered me also silver and gold and the peculiar treasures of kings,” he read aloud, whether to himself or to me I knew not, and went on, “So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me. . . .  Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do; and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”