Perhaps ‘non-fictional’ is hardly the word to apply, for Mr. Adrian’s favourite literature was travel and exploration, and travellers and explorers of all ages and all times, more especially of modern times, have found fiction a by no means to be despised element in their veracious and soul-stirring narratives. Mr. Adrian had had but one romance in his life. He had fallen in love with a beautiful girl, and fancied once that his passion was returned. He woke from his dream to find his lady-love the affianced wife of a successful rival, a country gentleman named Heritage. He had got over the blow and found another wife. Having devoted his youth and manhood to commerce, he had never wandered during his short holidays further than the coasts of his native isle. In his old age, when he had the leisure, he had not the inclination. He had become wedded to a certain routine of life; he liked English food and English habits, and was content to read all about foreign countries in the letters of ‘Our own Correspondent.’ Europe, even in literature, however, had no great attraction for John Adrian. He loved to lose himself in virgin forests and jungles, to sup with savages, and dance war-dances with the warriors of the Far West. He was at home in the South Sea Islands, and familiar with Central Africa. He could tell you more about the manners and customs of the Aztecs and the Bosjesmans than he could about the peculiarities of his next-door neighbour; and he had the most sublime faith in the perfect veracity of the thousand-and-one books of travel which he passed his leisure in devouring. Mrs. Adrian, on the contrary, was eminently practical. A good-hearted, loving wife, and a fond and devoted mother, she was yet, at times, a sore trial both to her husband and daughter. Mrs. Adrian was eccentric, and prided herself upon her outspokenness; further, Mrs. Adrian, in spite of much real nobility of nature, was mean in small things. Once a busy housewife, seeing to everything herself, and trotting about her house from morning to night, she had of late years grown rapidly stout, and at last arrived at a state of corpulence which, in conjunction with shortness of breath, compelled her to sit still and let Ruth superintend the domestic arrangements. It was her infirmity of body, doubtless, which gradually developed an infirmity of temper. Mrs. Adrian in her young days had been inclined to speak her mind and find fault. Now that she had nothing else to do, the practice had grown on her, and she was, at times, what Mr. Adrian, putting it very mildly, called ‘exceedingly trying.’ She would have gone through any discomfort, she would have sacrificed any pleasure, really to promote the happiness of those she loved; and yet she found her principal occupation in grumbling at what they did, and rendering them occasionally as uncomfortable as she could.