between it and the table, things gradually grew more lively.
Stories were told, often without any point, but not therefore
without effect; reminiscences, sorely pulpy and broken at the edges,
were offered and accepted with a laughter in which sober ears might
have detected a strangely alien sound; and adventures were related
in which truth was no necessary element to reception. In the case
of the postman, for instance, who had been dismissed for losing a
bag of letters the week before, not one of those present believed a
word he said; yet as he happened to be endowed with a small stock of
genuine humour, his stories were regarded with much the same favour
as if they had been authentic. But the revival scarcely reached Sir
George. He said little or nothing, but, between his slow gulps of
toddy, sat looking vacantly into his glass. It is true he smiled
absently now and then when the others laughed, but that was only for
manners. Doubtless he was seeing somewhere the saddest of all
visions -- the things that might have been. The wretched craving of
the lower organs stilled, and something spared for his brain, I
believe the chief joy his drink gave him lay in the power once more
to feel himself a gentleman. The washed hands, the shaven face, the
clean shirt, had something to do with it, no doubt, but the
necromantic whisky had far more.

What faded ghosts of ancestral dignity and worth and story the evil
potion called up in the mind of Sir George! -- who himself hung ready
to fall, the last, or all but the last, mildewed fruit of the tree
of Galbraith! Ah! if this one and that of his ancestors had but
lived to his conscience, and with some thought of those that were to
come after him, he would not have transmitted to poor Sir George, in
horrible addition to moral weakness, that physical proclivity which
had now grown to such a hideous craving. To the miserable wretch