"You make too much of it," returned the Swiss. "And what the devil!
After all, yours _was_ a fine family."

George Vendale's laugh betrayed a little vexation as he rejoined: "Well!
I was strongly attached to my parents, and when we first travelled
together, Mr. Obenreizer, I was in the first flush of coming into what my
father and mother left me. So I hope it may have been, after all, more
youthful openness of speech and heart than boastfulness."

"All openness of speech and heart! No boastfulness!" cried Obenreizer.
"You tax yourself too heavily. You tax yourself, my faith! as if you was
your Government taxing you! Besides, it commenced with me. I remember,
that evening in the boat upon the lake, floating among the reflections of
the mountains and valleys, the crags and pine woods, which were my
earliest remembrance, I drew a word-picture of my sordid childhood. Of
our poor hut, by the waterfall which my mother showed to travellers; of
the cow-shed where I slept with the cow; of my idiot half-brother always
sitting at the door, or limping down the Pass to beg; of my half-sister
always spinning, and resting her enormous goitre on a great stone; of my
being a famished naked little wretch of two or three years, when they
were men and women with hard hands to beat me, I, the only child of my
father's second marriage--if it even was a marriage. What more natural
than for you to compare notes with me, and say, 'We are as one by age; at
that same time I sat upon my mother's lap in my father's carriage,
rolling through the rich English streets, all luxury surrounding me, all
squalid poverty kept far from me. Such is _my_ earliest remembrance as
opposed to yours!'"

Mr. Obenreizer was a black-haired young man of a dark complexion, through
whose swarthy skin no red glow ever shone. When colour would have come