He rushed into the parlour, a tall, gaunt, middle-aged man, with a shrewd, kindly face, which beamed all over with delight, as he began shaking hands indiscriminately, saying how kind it was of us to come, and how welcome we were.
It was explained which of us he had specially to welcome, the others being only humble appendages, friends of the family, this well-beloved family, whose likenesses for two generations we saw everywhere about the room.
"Yes, miss, there they all are, your dear grandfather" (alas, only a likeness now!), "your father, and your uncle. They were all so good to me, and I would do anything for them, or for any one of their name. If I got a message that they wanted me for anything, I'd be off to London, or to Brazil, or anywhere, in half-an-hour."
And he really looked as if he would.
"But what will you take?" added the good man when the rapture and excitement of the moment had a little subsided, and his various questions as to the well-being of "the family" had been asked and answered. "You have dined, you say, but you'll have a cup of tea. My wife (that's the little maid I used to talk to your father about, miss; I always told him I wouldn't stay in Brazil, I must go back to England and marry my little maid), my wife makes the best cup of tea in all Cornwall. Here she is!"
And there entered, in afternoon gown and cap, probably just put on, a middle-aged, but still comely matron, who insisted that, even at this early hour—3 P.M.—to get a cup of tea for us was "no trouble at all."
"Indeed, she wouldn't think anything a trouble, no more than I should, miss, if it was for your family. They never forget me, nor I them."
It was here suggested that they were not a "forgetting" family. Nor was he a man likely to be soon forgotten. While the cup of tea, which proved to be a most sumptuous meal, was preparing, he took us all over his house, which was full of foreign curiosities, and experimental inventions. One, I remember, being a musical instrument, a sort of organ, which he had begun making when a mere boy, and taken with him all the way to Brazil and back. It had now found refuge in the little room he called his "workshop," which was filled with odds and ends that would have been delightful to a mechanical mind. He expounded them with enthusiasm, and we tried not to betray an ignorance, which in some of us would have been a sort of hereditary degradation.
"Ah! they were clever—your father and your uncle!—and how proud we all were when we finished our lighthouse, and got the Emperor to light it up for the first time. Look here, ladies, what do you think this is?"
He took out a small parcel, and solemnly unwrapped from it fold after fold of paper, till he came to the heart of it—a small wax candle!