And the old Hogarth, all deaf and bedimmed, said: "I had to say it
to you, and this night let it be: Richard, you are no son of mine".

At this point Hogarth's head dropped forward: but many a time,
during long years, he remembered a dream in which he had heard those
words: "Richard, you are no son of mine..."

The old Hogarth continued to ears that did not hear:

"I have kept it from you--for I'm under a bargain with a firm of
solicitors in London; but, Dick, it doesn't strike me as I am long
for this world: a queer feeling I've had in this left side the last
hour or two; and there's that Circular--I never heard of such a
thing in all my born days. But what can we do? You'll have to wear
the cap--or be turned out. Always I've said to myself, from a young
man: 'Get hold of a bit of land someways as your own God's own': but
I never did; the days went by and by, and it all seems no longer
than an after-dinner nap in a barn on a hot harvest-day. But a bit
of land--the man who has that can make all the rest work to keep
him. And if they turn me out, I couldn't live, lad: the old house
has got into my bones, somehow. Anyhow, I think the time is come to
tell you in my own way how the thing was. No son are you of mine,
Richard. Your mother, Rachel, who was a Londoner, served me an ill
turn while we were sweethearting, hankering after another man--a Jew
millionaire he was, she being a governess in his house; but,
Richard, I couldn't give her up: I married her three months before
you were born; and not a living creature knows, except, perhaps,
one--perhaps one: a priest he was, called O'Hara. But that's how it
was. Your father was a Jew, and your mother was a Jew, and you are a