a policeman, and to beget and rear successfully twelve children.
He was now, I gathered, living partly on his pension, and spoke
of this daughter married, this daughter in service here, and that
daughter in service there, one son settled in London and another
in the States, with something of a patriarchal pride, with the
independent air too of a man who could honestly say to himself
that, with few advantages from fortune, having had, so to say, to
work his passage, every foot and hour of it, across those
twenty-two thousand miles and those sixty-seven years, he had
made a thoroughly creditable job of his life.

As we walked along I caught glimpses in his vivid and
ever-varying talk of the qualities that had made his success
possible. They are always the same qualities!

A little pile of half-hewn stones, the remains of a ruined wall,
scattered by the roadside caught his eye.

"I've seen the time when I wouldn't have left them stones
lying out there," he said, and presently, "Why, God bless you,
I've made my own boots before to-day. Give me the tops and
I'll soon rig up a pair still."

And with all his success, and his evident satisfaction with his
lot, the man was neither a prig nor a teetotaller. He had
probably seen too much of the world to be either. Yet he had, he
said, been too busy all his life to spend much time in public-
houses, as we drank a pint of ale together in the inn which stood
at the end of the common.