Stiffly, and with manifest suffering, he rose from the ground. Yet, in a very real sense, he had a far better right to a place under those pines than even the poet Royal himself could claim. In his fevered outlaw imagination, conjuring up terrors where none existed, and courting dangers unaware, that place to him was sanctuary. The one spot on earth! For his fathers had cleared those hills above, and ploughed the fields beneath. That soldier of the Revolution was his own ancestor. Their names given in baptism and granted by birth were the same, Jeremiah Burton. In the year eighteen-twenty, one Jeremiah Burton had departed this life, full of honors; and now, a century later, this other Jeremiah Burton was still living, and under an exceeding weight of dishonor. A fugitive from justice, he was seeking sanctuary among his own kin. And no person in that State knew him for the Burton that he was. No less than the boy Royal, he had aspired to the arts. Writing, painting, dancing, acting, he had loved them, every one. Yet never to the extent of drudgery, or self-sacrifice, surely! Art for a good time’s sake was his motto. He had always joyously avowed himself a “‘_carpe diem_’ fellow, don’t you know.” Perhaps his Burton ancestors, in their passion for honest toil and meritorious self-immolation, had drawn too heavily on springs of energy, both physical and spiritual, that should have been reserved for their descendants. So young Jeremiah Burton wrote skits, painted landscapes, acted in vaudeville; seldom very well, never at great pains. Of all his various arenas for the exhibition of his personality, he had concluded that the stage offered the most glamorous possibilities. Still, Jeremiah is no name to be pasted gayly up on the billboards, is it? And even Burton itself has a melancholy look when printed. Very early in life, therefore, the Jeremiah Burton of the flushed forehead and fat predatory nose had Geraldized his Christian name, and given a twist, even more romantic, to his surname. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had hoped, when scarcely older than the boy Royal, to take the world by storm from behind the footlights. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had studied and strutted and caroused through the downward zigzag of his middle years. It was as Gerald Bertello that he was designated in the warrant for his arrest. But it was as Jeremiah Burton that he was making his last stand, there on the hill, among his kinsmen. Sanctuary!