A MAN in an apron that had once been white and in a cloth cap that had once been navy blue was painting a series of bold letters on Mr. Josiah Munt’s front gate. Bill Hollis was overwhelmed with depression, but at this interesting sight curiosity stirred him. He advanced upon the decorative artist who was whistling gently over a job in which he took a pride and a pleasure. Upon the ornate front of the large green gate was being inscribed the word

STRATHFIELDSAYE

Bill recognized the artist as a near neighbor of his own in Love Lane.

“Working for the Nobs, are you, Wickens?” There was a world of scorn in the tone of William Hollis, a world of sarcasm. And yet what was scorn and what was sarcasm in the presence of a hard fact, clear, outstanding, fully accomplished!

The artist expectorated a silent affirmative.

“Piecework, I suppose? Cut rates?” Mr. Munt had the reputation of being a very keen man of business.

The artist was too much absorbed in his labors to indulge in promiscuous talk.

William Hollis peered through the gate, to the rows of newly planted shrubs on either side the curving carriage drive. “Bleeding upstart” he muttered; then he turned on his heel and walked on up the road.

He had gone but a few yards when quite unexpectedly he came upon a massive figure in a black and white checked summer suit and a white billycock hat worn at a rather rakish angle. It was his father-in-law and they were face to face.

Mr. Munt was proceeding with a kind of elephantine dignity along the exact center of the sidewalk, and instinctively, before he was aware of what he had done, his son-in-law by stepping nimbly into the grassgrown gutter had conceded it to him. But in almost the same instant he scorned himself for his action; and the gesture of lordly indifference with which the proprietor of the Duke of Wellington directed his gaze upon the western gables of Strathfieldsaye, without a flicker of recognition of the person who had made way for him, suddenly brought William Hollis to the bursting point.

The world allows that in a stone jar of Blackhampton Old Ale there are magic qualities; and far down in Bill himself was hidden some deep strain of independent manhood. The City records proved—vide Bazeley’s famous Annals of Blackhampton, a second-hand copy of which was one of his most cherished possessions—that the name of Hollis had been known and honored in the town long before the name of Munt had been heard of. The Hollises were an old and distinguished Blackhampton clan. A William Hollis was mayor of the Borough in the year of the Armada. It was a family of wide ramifications. There was the great John Hollis the inventor, circa 1724-1798, there was Henry Hollis the poet, circa 1747-1801. Of these their present descendant was a kinsman so remote that the science of genealogy had lost track of their actual relationship. But beyond a doubt his father’s uncle, Troop Sergeant Major William Hollis, had fought at Waterloo. He himself was named after that worthy, and the old boy’s portrait and portions of his kit had long embellished the sitting room in Love Lane.

It was then, perhaps, force of ancestry quite as much as the virtue of the Blackhampton ale that moved William Hollis to his sudden and remarkable act of self-assertion. For as Josiah Munt passed him, head in air, and weather eye fixed upon the western gables of Strathfieldsaye, his son-in-law stopped, swung round and called after him in a voice that could be heard even by the decorative artist at work on the gate—

“Sally out of Quod yet?”

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