CHAPTER XI.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE Mr.Wickson did not send for father.

They met by chance on the ferry-boat to San Francisco, so that the warning he gave father was not premeditated.

Had they not met accidentally, there would not have been any warning.

Not that the outcome would have been different, however.
Father came of stout old Mayflower* stock, and the blood was imperative in him.
* One of the first ships that carried colonies to America, after the discovery of the New World.

Descendants of these original colonists were for a while inordinately proud of their genealogy; but in time the blood became so widely diffused that it ran in the veins practically of all Americans.
"Ernest was right," he told me, as soon as he had returned home.