jewel far more precious, which, when I gave you this rich chaplet, David, I deemed you did possess.’ ‘How do you call it, sir?’ ‘Obedience.’     

       ‘A word of doubtful import; for to obey, when duty is disgrace, is not a virtue.’     

       ‘I see you read my thought. In a word, I sent for you to know, wherefore you joined me not to-day in offering our—our——’     

       ‘Tribute.’     

       ‘Be it so: tribute. Why were you absent?’ ‘Because it was a tribute; I pay       none.’ ‘But that the dreary course of seventy winters has not erased the memory of my boyish follies, David, I should esteem you mad. Think you, because I am old, I am enamoured of disgrace, and love a house of bondage? If life were a mere question between freedom and slavery, glory and dishonour, all could decide. Trust me, there needs but little spirit to be a moody patriot in a sullen home, and vent your heroic spleen upon your fellow-sufferers, whose sufferings you cannot remedy. But of such stuff your race were ever made. Such deliverers ever abounded in the house of Alroy. And what has been the result? I found you and your sister orphan       infants, your sceptre broken, and your tribes dispersed. The tribute, which now at least we pay like princes, was then exacted with the scourge and offered in chains. I collected our scattered people, I re-established our ancient throne, and this day, which you look upon as a day of humiliation and of mourning, is rightly considered by all a day of triumph and of feasting; for, has it not proved in the very teeth of the Ishmaelites, that the sceptre has not yet departed from Jacob?’     

       ‘I pray you, uncle, speak not of these things. I would not willingly forget you are my kinsman, and a kind one. Let there not be strife between us. What my feelings are is nothing. They are my own: I cannot change them. And for my ancestors, if they pondered much, and achieved little, why then ‘twould seem our pedigree is pure, and I am their true son. At least one was a hero.’     

       ‘Ah! the great Alroy; you may well be proud of such an ancestor.’     

       ‘I am ashamed, uncle, ashamed, ashamed.’     

       ‘His sceptre still exists. At least, I have not betrayed him. And this brings me to the real purport of our 

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