Returning to the town of his nativity after sundry expeditions in Syria--upon which he had been accompanied by dusky gentlemen with pickaxes and curly, long-barrelled muskets--he met, and was married by, a lady who was ambitious, and who saw in him (probably as a fulfilment of another Kismetic punishment) a power of learning and a destined success.

Not long after the birth of their only child, a daughter, he was "called to fill the chair" of archaeology in a newly founded university; one of the kind which a State and a millionaire combine to purchase ready-made.

This one was handed down off the shelf in a more or less chaotic condition, and for a period of years betrayed considerable doubt as to its own intentions, undecided whether they were classical or technical; and in the settlement of that doubt lay the secret of the past of the one man in Plattville so unhappy as to possess a past.

From that settlement and his own preceding action resulted his downfall, his disgrace with his wife's relatives, the loss of his wife, the rage, surprise, and anguish of her sister, Martha, and Martha's husband, Henry Sherwood, and the separation from his little daughter, which was by far to him the hardest to bear.

For Fisbee, in his own way, and without consulting anybody--it never occurred to him, and he was supposed often to forget that he had a wife and child--had informally turned over to the university all the money which the banks had kindly taken care of, and had given it to equip an expedition which never expedited.