frugal. Therefore, when we give rewards, shall we not give them where
they are justly due?" Something might be said for a point of view
so diametrically opposed to our own, but the question of ethics has
nothing to do with my story.

The strange feature of it is that the very night before the Edict
appeared--when the I.G. had not the slightest hint of what was in
store for him--he dreamed of his father's father--a thing he had not
done for years. Dressed in a snuff-coloured suit, with knee-breeches
and shining shoe buckles, he appeared walking down the little street
of Portadown leaning heavily upon a blackthorn stick and murmuring
sadly, "Nobody cares for me, nobody takes any notice of me." Nobody,
indeed?

[Illustration: SIR ROBERT HART'S STABLES IN 1890.]

The very next evening at a dinner party at the French Legation some
one told the I.G. of the new honour, gazetted an hour before, and how
an Emperor, with a stroke of his Vermilion Pencil, had deprived the
ghost of a grievance.

Equally romantic was a coincidence that happened when the I.G. was
made a Baronet in 1893. The question of arms then coming up, he made
all possible enquiries concerning those which his family had a right
to use. Without doubt the Harts did bear arms in the days of William
of Orange, when they were granted to the famous Dutchman Captain van
Hardt who so distinguished himself at the Battle of the Boyne. But
after his death the family grew poor; the arms fell into disuse and
were forgotten so completely that one descendant thought they might
have been a hart rampant, while another declared they were a sheaf of