aristocrat,--though that was the very last word James Mesurier would
have thought of applying to himself. He was a man of business, serving
God and his employers with stern uprightness, and bringing up a large
family with something of the Puritan severity which had marked his own
early training; and, as in his own case no such allowance had been made,
making no allowance in his rigid abstract code for the diverse
temperaments of his children,--children in whom certain qualities and
needs of his own nature, dormant from his birth, were awakening,
supplemented by the fuller-fed intelligence and richer nature of the
mother, into expansive and rebellious individualities.

It was now about eleven o'clock, and the house was thus lit and alive
half-an-hour beyond the rigorously enforced bed-time. An hour before,
James Mesurier had been peacefully engaged on the task which had been
nightly with him at this hour for twenty-five years,--the writing of his
diary, in a shorthand which he wrote with a neatness, almost a
daintiness, that always marked his use of pen and ink, and gave to his
merely commercial correspondence and his quite exquisitely kept
accounts, a certain touch of the scholar,--again an air of distinction
in excess of, and unaccounted for, by the nature of the interests which
it dignified.

His somewhat narrow range of reading, had you followed it by his careful
markings through those bound volumes of sermons in the bookcase, bore
the same evidence of inherited and inadequately occupied refinement. His
life from boyhood had been too much of a struggle to leave him much
leisure for reading, and such as he had enjoyed had been diverted into
evangelical channels by the influence of a certain pious old lady, with
whom as a young man he had boarded, and for whose memory all his life
he cherished a reverence little short of saint-worship.