It was one beautiful day, when Captain Reeves had gone high up among the mountain tops in search of ptarmigan, that he told me something concerning the poor fellow’s life.
“Yes,” he said, “Miggie, as Mina calls him, is very, very merry in company, but I can assure you that he has his melancholy moments when alone. For although his mother and he were both in comfortable circumstances before his father’s death, they are terribly badly off now.
“It is not an uncommon story theirs. Mr. M‘Lean, my brother-in-law, was a retired advocate, and the little family lived in a most charming villa in the west-end suburbs.
“It was indeed strange that an advocate should have put all his eggs in one basket, so to speak; but like many hundreds, he had the most perfect faith in the L——r Society, its interest and its dividends, and all his savings were locked up therein.
“The society came down, as we all know, with a terrible crash, scattering its members broadcast through the land—well-to-do one day, beggars and paupers the next.
“It was far more than my poor brother could stand. The beautiful villa was given up, and its furniture sold, nothing more being left than just sufficient to furnish two rooms and a kitchen in a poorer district of the town.
“Then the poor fellow sickened and died.
“Miguel had already secured the degree of M.A. from the university, and was in his first year’s study of divinity when the crash came and his father died.
“‘Mother,’ he had said, ‘I shall now give up all idea of the church, much as I should like to be a minister, and become a schoolmaster. I thus can keep you, and we may be happy yet in a humble way.’
“But his mother answered, ‘No, no, no, boy mine. I can do something with my needle, and brother has promised to help us a little every week. You must study on till you become a minister, and I feel sure God has your church waiting for you somewhere.’