out and encouraged a detailed account of the time spent at Mount Dunstan vicarage.  It was easily encouraged.  Selden’s affectionate admiration for the vicar led him on to enthusiasm.  The quiet house and garden, the old books, the afternoon tea under the copper beech, and the long talks of old things, which had been so new to the young New Yorker, had plainly made a mark upon his life, not likely to be erased even by the rush of after years.

“The way he knew history was what got me,” he said.  “And the way you got interested in it, when he talked.  It wasn’t just history, like you learn at school, and forget, and never see the use of, anyhow.  It was things about men, just like yourself—­hustling for a living in their way, just as we’re hustling in Broadway.  Most of it was fighting, and there are mounds scattered about that are the remains of their forts and camps.  Roman camps, some of them.  He took me to see them.  He had a little old pony chaise we trundled about in, and he’d draw up and we’d sit and talk.  ‘There were men here on this very spot,’ he’d say, ’looking out for attack, eating, drinking, cooking their food, polishing their weapons, laughing, and shouting—­men—­Selden, fifty-five years before Christ was born—­and sometimes the New Testament times seem to us so far away that they are half a dream.’  That was the kind of thing he’d say, and I’d sometimes feel as if I heard the Romans shouting.  The country about there was full of queer places, and both he and Lord Dunstan knew more about them than I know about Twenty-third Street.”

“You saw Lord Mount Dunstan often?” Mr. Vanderpoel suggested.

“Every day, sir.  And the more I saw him, the more I got to like him.  He’s all right.  But it’s hard luck to be fixed as he is—­that’s stone-cold truth.  What’s a man to do?  The money he ought to have to keep up his place was spent before he was born.  His father and his eldest brother were a bum lot, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were fools.  He can’t sell the place, and he wouldn’t if he could.  Mr. Penzance was so fond of him that sometimes he’d say things.  But,” hastily, “perhaps I’m talking too much.”

“You happen to be talking about questions I have been greatly interested in.  I have thought a good deal at times of the position of the holders of large estates they cannot afford to keep up.  This special instance is a case in point.”

G. Selden felt himself in luck again.  Reuben S., quite evidently, found his subject worthy of undivided attention.  Selden had not heartily liked Lord Mount Dunstan, and lived in the atmosphere surrounding him, looking about him with sharp young New York eyes, without learning a good deal.

He had seen the practical hardship of the situation, and laid it bare.