Perhaps it was the result of my reading, or of a purposeless sentiment, or of Fate--let it be what you will; but I was moved to take that road, in an easy sauntering mood. Its freedom, its inviting openness appealed to me. I am no believer in the divinity which hedges kings or exacts its wages of sin; but I _am_ a believer in Luck. Luck is the only power, so it seems to me, who can reconcile the discordant claims of the creeds. Some men--most, one may say--pray to him in vain. I have an idea that he was the nameless, the unknown God of the Greeks. And, no doubt, of his nature, it is fruitless to appeal to Luck. Perversity is his rule of Godhead--his rules prove the exception. He smiles not on his votaries, nor frowns on his maligners. Incuriousness about him is the only way--but by no means the inevitable one--to attract his notice. Whereby, I really think I became his casual protégé. In all these days my creed was never other than a creed of indifferent and independent fatalism--if to fatalism can be applied such a term of belief. In any case it was near enough to aggravate Luck into seeking to win me to _his_ worship instead. He made a first tentative bid for my suffrage on the present occasion. I had sauntered a half mile, perhaps, up this pleasant old coaching way, the open common, with its ponds and trees and gorse thickets, to my right hand, to my left a long rank of houses, comfortable, mellow, prosperous, having for the great part bushy gardens in front, when my eye was caught by vision of a cosy tavern, standing across the way in a copse of elm-trees, and bearing in its every appointment and circumstance the tokens of a vanished era. The little paddock of turf in front, planted with the sign of the “Windmill,” and having its own private posts and rails, round which the drive swept; the wooden horse trough; the brown of the walls and the gold and grass-green canvas hung up on them, inviting irresistibly to somebody’s “Entire”--here was the right Regency travellers’ rest-and-be-thankful. It was mild bright weather, and a water cart went by sprinkling up an aromatic scent of dust. I thought of beer, beer in a glass, amber and sparkling, with a kiss of foam at the lip, and I crossed the road to the tavern. _And there, over its door, stuck up before my eyes, was the legend_ “_Richard Gaskett, licensed dealer in beer, tobacco and spirits._” A sort of catalepsy seized me, as I looked and gaped. The coincidence, of course, _might_ be just a coincidence. Yet Gaskett was not what one might call an everyday name--and then _Richard_ Gaskett, and to occur in this place of all places! Suddenly the thought rushed into me, as if a plug had been taken out of my brain: “Gaskett! Was it, perhaps, after all, my mother’s maiden name, and my dishonoured grandfather a publican?”