conjectural, and whose legends were largely undecipherable. Uncle Jenico would never submit these, the cream of his collection, to expert criticism. He hugged them as a miser hugs his gold, but with a diviner intent. I alone was permitted to gloat with him over the hoard. “There’s your jointure, Dicky,” he would say. “Look at it accumulating for you, without an effort of its own, at compound interest. There’s no trustee like a collector who knows his business. You may turn over current money to increase it; but the more you leave that alone the better you’ll realize on it some day. The antiquity market is always a rising one. Every year adds its interest to it. We won’t touch the principal yet--not till you come of age. Then we’ll put it up, my boy--then we’ll put it up; and you shall eat your dinners, and follow in your dear father’s footsteps, and have chambers in Fountain Court itself.” Did he have a real faith in this picture? He had a faith in having a faith in it, anyhow. Yet sometimes I could not help thinking he shrunk from that same test of criticism; from the conceivable discovery that he had wasted all these years of his life on a fond chimera. I am glad that in the end the test was never forced; that circumstances came to lay for ever the necessity of it, and in a way than which none other could have delighted him better. For I believe a realization of the truth would have broken his kind, unselfish heart. He had not during this time altogether eschewed his former habits and enthusiasms. Periodic inventions of purely local inspiration marked it. He designed a respirator to be lined with porous shavings of driftwood, so that the asthmatic merchant might inhale ozone in the thickest fogs of Lombard Street. He planned a boat to be steered from the front by means of a rudder which was merely a jointed elongation of the prow, or false beak hinging to the neck, like a fish’s head and gills: a splendid conception, seeing how the steersman would be also the look-out, and the crew aft suffer no more responsibility than passengers in a train. Other happy notions of his were “the luminous angler,” a hook rubbed with phosphorus for night fishing; a scheme for pickling sandhoppers; and an uncapsizable boat, the buoyant principle whereof was an armour of light iron pipings, each tube of which was to be divided into a number of little water-tight compartments. None of these was ever, to my knowledge, put to the actual test, so pledged is our conservatism to run in a circle. The old stern-steerer was good enough for our fathers, and were we to be more exacting than they, who stand to us for all holy prescription? No inspired inventor ever yet profited by his inspiration; nor did his descendants find that inspiration marketable until it was mellowed to a tradition. For which reason Uncle Jenico had to be content, like the magnanimous soul he was, with planting for the generations to come.