even in their simple family records,—­the flyleaf of a Bible,—­that Peter Atherly’s great-grandfather was an Englishman who brought over to his Majesty’s Virginian possessions his only son, then a boy.  It was not established, however, to what class of deportation he belonged:  whether he was suffering exile from religious or judicial conviction, or if he were only one of the articled “apprentices” who largely made up the American immigration of those days.  Howbeit, “Atherly” was undoubtedly an English name, even suggesting respectable and landed ancestry, and Peter Atherly was proud of it.  He looked somewhat askance upon his Irish and German fellow citizens, and talked a good deal about “race.”  Two things, however, concerned him:  he was not in looks certainly like any type of modern Englishman as seen either on the stage in San Francisco, or as an actual tourist in the mining regions, and his accent was undoubtedly Southwestern.  He was tall and dark, with deep-set eyes in a singularly immobile countenance; he had an erect but lithe and sinewy figure even for his thirty odd years, and might easily have been taken for any other American except for the single exception that his nose was distinctly Roman, and gave him a distinguished air.  There was a suggestion of Abraham Lincoln (and even of Don Quixote) in his tall, melancholy figure and length of limb, but nothing whatever that suggested an Englishman.

It was shortly after the christening of Atherly town that an incident occurred which at first shook, and then the more firmly established, his mild monomania.  His widowed mother had been for the last two years an inmate of a private asylum for inebriates, through certain habits contracted while washing for the camp in the first year of her widowhood.  This had always been a matter of open sympathy to Rough and Ready; but it was a secret reproach hinted at in Atherly, although it was known that the rich Peter Atherly kept his mother liberally supplied, and that both he and his sister “Jinny” or Jenny Atherly visited her frequently.  One day he was telegraphed for, and on going to the asylum found Mrs. Atherly delirious and raving.  Through her son’s liberality she had bribed an attendant, and was fast succumbing to a private debauch.  In the intervals of her delirium she called Peter by name, talked frenziedly and mysteriously of his “high connections”—­alluded to himself and his sister as being of the “true breed”—­and with a certain vigor of epithet, picked up in the familiarity of the camp during the days when she was known as “Old Ma’am Atherly” or “Aunt Sally,” declared that they were “no corn-cracking Hoosiers,” “hayseed pikes,” nor “northern Yankee scum,” and that she should yet live to see them “holding their own lands again and the lands of their forefathers.”  Quieted at last by opiates, she fell into a more lucid but scarcely less distressing attitude.  Recognizing her son again, as well as her own fast failing condition, she sarcastically