acquired a stock which never failed her, and which had often cheered her
lonely hours by successive cradles. She had a fine natural gift of
recitation, and in evening hours when the home was particularly united
in some glow of visitors or birthday celebration, she would be persuaded
to recall some of those old songs and simple apologues, with such charm
that even her husband, to whom verse was naturally an incomprehensible
triviality, was visibly softened, and perhaps, deep in the sadness of
his silent nature, moved to a passing realisation of a certain something
kind and musical in life which he had strangely missed.

This greater breadth of temperament and training enabled Mary Mesurier
to understand and make allowances for the narrower and harder nature of
her husband, whom she learnt in time rather to pity for the bleakness of
his early days, than to condemn for their effect upon his character. He
was strong, good, clever, and handsome, and exceptionally all those four
good reasons for loving him; and the intellectual sympathy, the sharing
of broader interests, which she sometimes missed in him, she had for
some three or four years come to find in her eldest son, who, to his
father's bewilderment and disappointment, had reincarnated his own
strong will, in connection with literary practices and dreams which
threatened to end in his becoming a poet, instead of the business man
expected of him, for which development that love of poetry in one
parent, and a certain love of books in both, was no doubt to some degree
guiltily responsible.

James Mesurier, as we have said, was no judge of poetry; and, had he
been so, a reading of his son's early effusions would have made him
still more obdurate in the choice for him of a commercial career; but on
general principles he was quite sufficiently firm against any but the
most non-committing, leisure-hour flirtation with the Muse. The mother,