Publisher's Synopsis
"Hast committed a crime, and think'st thou to escape? Alas, my father!"-Old Play. "Evil deeds do not die," and the handsome young man stretched out in an easy chair by the fire raised his curly black head and gazed into the farthest corner of the comfortably furnished room as if challenging a denial of this statement. No one contradicted him, for he was alone, and with a slightly satirical smile he went on. "One fellow sows the seeds, and another has to reap them-no, you don't reap seeds, you reap what springs up. Deadly plants, we will say, nightshades and that sort of thing; and the surprised and inoffensive descendants of sinful sires have to drop their ordinary occupations and seize reaping-hooks to clean out these things that shoot up in their paths. Here am I, for example, a comparatively harmless product of the nineteenth century, confronted with a upas-tree planted by my great-grandfather of the eighteenth, -just one hundred and forty years ago. It was certainly very heedless in the old boy," and he smiled again and stared indolently at the leaping flames in the grate.
