He then invited Anthony into a little room, a sort of laboratory, at the back of the shop, in which were a brick furnace, a still in operation, crucibles, mortars, jars of various colored liquids, and bladders filled with powders. "Sit down," said old Christopher, as he took some dusty, sheep-covered books from a stool. "Sit down and tell me how it has been with you these many years." Anthony sat down; and the little apothecary sat near him, a shaft of noonday light from a window dazzling upon the crown of his head. "I have seen your uncle, of course, many times since," said he. "But in what talk I've had with him he never mentioned you." "I suppose," said Anthony, "he had nothing to tell. There was a difference between my father and him--nothing serious, but still a difference--at the time of the separation of their interests. I don't think a half-dozen letters passed between them afterwards, I know they never saw each other again." The old apothecary clicked his tongue pityingly. "Such wretched states of mind people permit themselves to get into," said he. "There was no reason why, if your mother desired to go back to her native land, that your father should not sell out his interest and take her away." "I think, from the little I've heard my father say,--for he seldom mentioned it,--my uncle understood and agreed to all that. But what he disliked was the sudden curtailing of the firm's operations because of the moneys that had gone out of it." Old Christopher nodded. "Yes, yes; Charles is like that. He thinks in a large way. I've fancied sometimes that the eyes of his mind are so fashioned that they cannot see anything under a given size. But," coming back to the subject with a sudden brightening of manner, "what of yourself? What have you been doing? Tell me everything about it. I'm sure it's of interest, for you were always full of that." The old man laughed, and the sound had a clear ring, surprisingly like that of a boy. "It once would have taken a dozen to keep track of you." Anthony told him the story of his transplanting; of the ship that had taken them, and all their household effects, down the Delaware, and up the Mississippi; of New Orleans and the pirate Spaniards who held its customs and dwarfed the port; of the quaint old streets; of the mingling of races; the color and strangeness of life there; of the mission-school, where the good padres had taken him in hand much to his advantage; of his father's losses in business, caused by the tricky methods of the port authorities, and then of his death. His mother had lived a year longer; then she, too, had died. "The money, then," said Christopher, "is gone." "All of my father's--yes," replied Anthony, "They stripped him to the bones. But there is still the interest in Rufus Stevens' Sons, left me by my grandfather; that had never been disturbed. The income from it made my mother comfortable while she lived."