XXXIV. TOLD HIM A STORY
XXXV. CONCLUSION




CHAPTER I.

LOOKING BACK AT EARLY LIFE.


When the slow years of youth were gone and the hastening time of
manhood had come, the first thing that Henry DeGolyer, looking back,
could call from a mysterious darkness into the dawn of memory was that
he awoke one night in the cold arms of his dead mother. That was in
New Orleans. The boy's father had aspired to put the face of man upon
lasting canvas, but appetite invited whisky to mix with his art, and
so upon dead walls he painted the trade-mark bull, and in front of
museums he exaggerated the distortion of the human freak.

After the death of his mother, the boy was taken to the Foundlings'
Home, where he was scolded by women and occasionally knocked down by a
vagabond older than himself. Here he remembered to have seen his
father but once. It was a Sunday when he came, years after the gentle
creature, holding her child in her arms, had died at midnight. The
painter laughed and cried and begged an old woman for a drink of
brandy. He went away, and after an age had seemed to pass the matron
of the place took the boy on her lap and told him that his father was
dead, and then, putting him down, she added: "Run along, now, and be
good."