“Alas! so I see.  That decides me to be candid—­and hungry.”

“Well, I am off; I don’t stick to my friends and bore them with my affairs like that egotistical hussy, Jane Bazalgette.  I amuse myself, and leave them to amuse themselves; that is my notion of politeness.  I am going to see my pigs fed, then into the village.  I am building a new blacksmith’s shop there (you must come and look at it the first thing to-morrow); and at six, if you want to find me—­”

“I shall peep behind the soup-tureen.”

“And there I shall be, if I am alive.”  At dinner the old boy threw himself into the work with such zeal that soon after the cloth was removed, from fatigue and repletion, he dropped asleep, with his shoulder toward Lucy, but his face instinctively turned toward the fire.  Lucy crept away on tiptoe, not to disturb him.

In about an hour he bustled into the drawing-room, ordered tea, blew up the footman because the cook had not water boiling that moment, drank three cups, then brightened up, rubbed his hands, and with a cheerful, benevolent manner, “Now, Lucy,” cried he, “come and help me puzzle out this tiresome genealogy.”

A smile of warm assent from Lucy, and the old bachelor and the blooming Hebe were soon seated with a mountain of parchments by their side, and a tree spreading before them.

It was not a finite tree like an elm or an oak; no, it was a banyan tree; covered an acre, and from its boughs little suckers dropped to earth, and turned to little trees, and had suckers in their turn, and “confounded the confusion.”

Uncle Fountain’s happiness depended, pro tem, on proving that he was a sucker from the great bough of the Fontaines of Melton; and why?  Because, this effected, he had only to go along that bough by an established pedigree to the great trunk of the Funteyns of Salle, and the first Funteyn of Salle was said to be (and this he hoped to prove true) great-grandson of Robert de Fontibus, son of John de Fonte.

Now Uncle Fountain could prove himself the shoot of George his father (a step at which so many pedigrees halt), who was the shoot of William, who was the shoot of Richard; but here came a gap of eighty years between him and that Fountain, younger son of Melton, to whom he wanted to hook on.  Now the logic of women, children, and criticasters is a thing of gaps; they reason as marches a kangaroo; but to mathematicians, logicians, and genealogists, a link wanting is a chain broken.  This blank then made Uncle Fountain miserable, and he cried out for help.  Lucy came with her young eyes, her woman’s patience, and her own complaisance.  A great ditch yawned between a crocheteer and a rotten branch he coveted.  Our Quinta Curtia flung herself, her eyesight, and her time into that ditch.

Twelve o’clock came, and found them still wallowing in modern antiquity.

“Bless me!” cried Mr. Fountain when John brought up the bed-candles, “how time flies when one is really employed.”