CHAPTER V 



OFFICIAL REPORT TO FAMILY ON PATERNAL GENEALOGY 



When Joseph Keeler returned to Toronto, he did so a changed, 

 re-formed man. Hitherto the family had mostly counted on its 

 descent from the country rector, who had held the thanksgiving 

 service for the suppression of the Rebellion, through instructions 

 from the lieutenant-governor, and had piously and with fervour 

 read the Litany 



"From all sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion, Good Lord deliver us. ' 



If not in so many words, Mr. Keeler had been more than once 

 made to feel that yet, even though he was a successful wholesale 

 merchant, the true measure of the social family success had 

 come through the female line of succession. This belief was 

 fully impressed upon him, especially by his eldest son and daugh- 

 ter. The former was distinctly a member of the legal profession, 

 and the latter, for what were to her the best and most logical 

 reasons, bore herself like that other Maud in Tennyson: 



"But a cold clear-cut face, as I found her when her carriage passed, 

 Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null." 



She had been for a term or two, recording secretary to the 

 "Daughters of the Empire," and her name, more than once, had 

 been seen appended to resolutions and addresses, breathing 

 even redolent of loyalty to the King, to the Empire and to the 

 Over-Seas Club. 



When now Mr. Keeler returned from the Bay and Ernest 

 burst upon the dinner-table with a highly picturesque, if 

 slightly exaggerated and inaccurate account of what they had 

 heard and seen of the queer old place, where father's ancestors 

 were buried, and of the canal, which one of them had had built, 

 the father felt a distinct sense of approaching, if not of having 

 wholly arrived on, the social plane, where his very superior 

 family had in these later years, when his business success and 

 financial standing in the community made it possible, found 



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