"But it may be, sir, if a man of honour pursue it! There are some soldiers who have been great rascals!"
My uncle looked posed, and his black brows met thoughtfully.
"You are right, boy, I dare say," he answered somewhat mildly. "But do you think that it ought to give me as much pleasure to look on my old ruined tower, if I knew it had been bought by some herring-dealer, like the first ancestor of the Poles, as I do now, when I know it was given to a knight and gentleman, (who traced his descent from an Anglo-Dane in the time of King Alfred,) for services done in Aquitaine and Gascony, by Henry the Plantagenet? And do you mean to tell me, that I should have been the same man, if I had not from a boy associated that old tower with all ideas of what its owners were, and should be, as knights and gentlemen? Sir, you would have made a different being of me, if at the head of my pedigree you had clapped a herring-dealer; though, I dare say, the herring-dealer might have been as good a man as ever the Anglo-Dane was! God rest him!"
"And for the same reason, I suppose, sir, that you think my father never would have been quite the same being he is, if he had not made that notable discovery touching our descent from the great William Caxton, the printer!"
My uncle bounded as if he had been shot; bounded so uncautiously, considering the materials of which one leg was composed, that he would have fallen into a strawberry-bed if I had not caught him by the arm.
"Why, you—you—you young jackanapes," cried the Captain, shaking me off as soon as he had regained his equilibrium. "You do not mean to inherit that infamous crotchet my brother has got into his head? You do not mean to exchange Sir William de Caxton, who fought and fell at Bosworth, for the mechanic who sold blackletter pamphlets in the sanctuary at Westminster?"
"That depends on the evidence, uncle!"
"No, sir, like all noble truths, it depends upon faith. Men, now-a-days," continued my uncle, with a look of ineffable disgust, "actually require that truths should be proved."
"It is a sad conceit on their part, no doubt, my dear uncle. But till a truth is proved, how can we know that it is a truth?"
I thought that in that very sagacious question I had effectually caught my uncle. Not I. He slipped through it like an eel.