by a grizzled moustache moulded for the precise formation that emphasizes such syllables as el, the hooked nose and sallow cheeks, the grizzled brows and grey eyes drawn down at the corners.  But for all its ancestral strength of feature, it was a face from which will had been extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism, the indomitable hardness it should have proclaimed, and which have been so characteristically embodied in Mr. St. Gaudens’s statue of the Puritan.  His clothes were slightly shabby, but always neat.

Little as one might have guessed it, however, what may be called a certain transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him.  He had a hobby almost amounting to an obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who have slipped downward in the social scale.  It was the Bumpus Family in America.  He collected documents about his ancestors and relations, he wrote letters with a fine, painful penmanship on a ruled block he bought at Hartshorne’s drug store to distant Bumpuses in Kansas and Illinois and Michigan, common descendants of Ebenezer, the original immigrant, of Dolton.  Many of these western kinsmen answered:  not so the magisterial Bumpus who lived in Boston on the water side of Beacon, whom likewise he had ventured to address,—­to the indignation and disgust of his elder daughter, Janet.

“Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?” she demanded once, scornfully.

“Why?  Aren’t we descended from him?”

“How many generations?”

“Seven,” said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.

Janet was quick at figures.  She made a mental calculation.

“Well, you’ve got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors of Ebenezer’s time, haven’t you?”

Edward was a little surprised.  He had never thought of this, but his ardour for Ebenezer remained undampened.  Genealogy—­his own—­had become his religion, and instead of going to church he spent his Sunday mornings poring over papers of various degrees of discolouration, making careful notes on the ruled block.

This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that had somehow been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, was also a comfort.  It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack of sympathy of his daughters and his wife.  Hannah Bumpus took the situation more grimly:  she was a logical projection in a new environment of the religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance.  She did not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; life was a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular trap had a treadmill,—­a round of household duties she kept whirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of the family.  It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible belief in one’s destiny,—­which Hannah had not.  But she kept the little flat with its worn furniture,—­which had known so many