"You've been successful, Phillie," she said, the thought uppermost in mind coming out first. "It was such an undertaking and we're so pleased." She might have said proud, but that was a vain word. Self-warned about the weakness of parents with only sons, it had been her rule never to spoil Phil with praise. "Yes, I've done pretty well for a----" and he glanced around at his father in the freemasonry of a settled comradeship. "For a minister's son!" put in the father, chuckling. "I had to," Philip proceeded. "I was right up against it. It was rough stuff at first and Mexico the limit!" "What language!" exclaimed the father, who could be a purist on occasion. "Very expressive!" said the mother, defending her son. "It must have been rough, indeed." She would have forgiven Philip if he had said damn that afternoon. "In other words," observed the Reverend Dr. Sanford, "when it came to the rough stuff Philip was no piker! I've been studying up so as to make you feel at home," he added, with another chuckle. "What do you think my first job was?" Phil said. "I didn't tell you that. It was cleaning out cattle cars." "Oh, Phil, no!" She looked down at her son's hands as if wondering how such horrors could be. "He has washed them since," observed the father. "Now you're both up to your old tricks, teasing me!" she said admonishingly. "And, Phillie"--she pressed a point of unsatisfied maternal curiosity which his letters had never answered--"you never told us why it was that you did not go to work for Peter--that is, your side of it. You seem to have had a quarrel with him." In a sense Peter Smithers was one of the Sanford family. He had been a clever village boy whom Phil's grandfather had taken under his wing some forty years ago, and the type of clever village boy who does not need sheltering wings for long. Middle age found him the head of a great manufacturing business in New Jersey. Hieing homeward, New England fashion, he had built himself a big country place back in the hills, which he referred to as "my little farm." People spoke of him as a millionaire, but he insisted that he was dirt poor. He was a bachelor, with no heirs, a fact which Mrs. Sanford, more practical than the clergyman, could never forget when she thought of the future of her son. "What was Peter's side?" Phil asked. "He said that you didn't want to begin at the bottom of the ladder." "And yet he began at the bottom of a cattle car," said the father. "I didn't mind a humble beginning," said Phil, "but from the way that Peter spoke I was afraid there wasn't in his establishment a place so humble but if I took it I might be the ruin of his business. You see, mother, I was cleaning out those cattle cars on the orders of a stranger. I knew that he was not hiring me because my grandfather had done him a favour."