considerably under seventy, but, as a matter of fact, he was but a few
years short of eighty. He was extremely tall, over six feet, and stood
upright as a lifeguardsman; indeed, his height and stately carriage
would alone have made him a remarkable-looking man, had there been
nothing else unusual about him; but, as it happened, his features were
as uncommon as his person. They were clear-cut and cast in a noble
mould. The nose was large and aquiline, the chin, like his son
Philip's, square and determined; but it was his eyes that gave a
painful fascination to his countenance. They were steely blue, and
glittered under the pent-house of his thick eyebrows, that, in
striking contrast to the snow-white of his hair, were black in hue, as
tempered steel glitters in a curtained room. It was those eyes, in
conjunction with sundry little peculiarities of temper, that had
earned for the old man the title of "Devil Caresfoot," a sobriquet in
which he took peculiar pride. So pleased was he with it, indeed, that
he caused it to be engraved in solid oak letters an inch long upon the
form of a life-sized and life-like portrait of himself that hung over
the staircase in the house.

"I am determined," he would say to his son, "to be known to my
posterity as I was known to my contemporaries. The picture represents
my person not inaccurately; from the nickname my descendants will be
able to gather what the knaves and fools with whom I lived thought of
my character. Ah! boy, I am wearing out; people will soon be staring
at that portrait and wondering if it was like me. In a very few years
I shall no longer be 'devil,' but 'devilled,'" and he would chuckle at
his grim and ill-omened joke.

Philip felt his father's eyes playing upon him, and shrunk from them.
His face had, at the mere thought of the consequences of his