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‘‘Oh, no, sir,’ was the answer, uttered with all the due humility of the trained servant, but accompanied by an involuntarily measuring glance that scanned the young man’s splendid proportions. ‘Your father, sir, never lost his leanness. His figure was always the same, broad-shouldered, deep in the chest, big-boned, but lean, always lean, sir, in the middle. When he was laid out, sir, and bathed, his body would have shamed most of the young men about town. He always took good care of himself; it was those exercises in bed, sir. Half an hour every morning. Nothing prevented. He called it religion.’

‘Yes, he was a fine figure of a man,’ the young man responded idly, glancing to the stock-ticker and the several telephones his father had installed.

‘He was that,’ Parker agreed eagerly. ‘He was lean and aristocratic in spite of his shoulders and bone and chest. And you’ve inherited it, sir, only on more generous lines.’

Young Francis Morgan, inheritor of many millions as well as brawn, lolled back luxuriously in a huge leather chair, stretched his legs after the manner of a full-vigored menagerie lion that is over-spilling with vigor, and glanced at a headline of the morning paper which informed him of a fresh slide in the Culebra Cut at Panama.

‘If I didn’t know we Morgans didn’t run that way,’ he yawned, ‘I’d be fat already from this existence… Eh, Parker?’

The elderly valet, who had neglected prompt reply, startled at the abrupt interrogative interruption of the pause.

‘Oh, yes, sir,’ he said hastily. ‘I mean, no, sir. You are in the pink of condition.’

‘Not on your life,’ the young man assured him. ‘I may not be getting fat, but I am certainly growing soft… Eh, Parker?’

‘Yes, sir. No, sir; no, I mean no, sir. You’re just the same as when you came home from college three years ago.’

‘And took up loafing as a vocation,’ Francis laughed. ‘Parker!’

Parker was alert attention. His master debated with himself ponderously, as if the problem were of profound importance, rubbing the while the bristly thatch of the small toothbrush moustache he had recently begun to sport on his upper lip.

‘Parker, I’m going fishing.’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘I ordered some rods sent up. Please joint them and let me give them the once over. The idea drifts through my mind that two weeks in the woods is what I need. If I don’t, I’ll surely start laying on flesh and disgrace the whole family tree. You remember Sir Henry? the old original Sir Henry, the buccaneer old swashbuckler?’ ‘Yes, sir; I’ve read of him, sir.’

Parker had paused in the doorway until such time as the ebbing of his young master’s volubility would permit him to depart on the errand.

‘Nothing to be proud of, the old pirate.’

‘Oh, no, sir,’ Parker protested. ‘He was Governor of Jamaica. He died respected.’

‘It was a mercy he didn’t die hanged,’ Francis laughed. ‘As it was, he’s the only disgrace in the family that he founded. But what I was going to say is that I’ve looked him up very carefully. He kept his figure and he died lean in the middle, thank God. It’s a good inheritance he passed down. We Morgans never found his treasure; but beyond rubies is the lean-in-the-middle legacy he bequeathed us. It’s what is called a fixed character in the breed that’s what the profs taught me in the biology course.’