64 The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. 



short period of rest and regular hours with outings on the broad 

 promenades, which gave the young lady a feeling of being quite 

 well again, the mother yielded readily to Fanny's inclinations 

 and both were soon involved in the social whirl at the fashionable 

 watering-place. 



In a few weeks they had returned home with Fanny looking 

 browned by the sun and sea breezes, and so matters flowed along 

 much as usual in the home. But it was soon noted by the father 

 that his daughter was often pale and listless in the morning 

 with a poor and fastidious appetite, while showing in the after- 

 noon a flushed cheek, often associated with an unnatural bril- 

 liance and unusual excitability, both of which raised his gravest 

 apprehensions. His wife, however, quieted his fears with the 

 promise "that a summer spent at their Muskoka home would 

 bring Fanny home bright and strong again." 



The summer came and went, the daughter coming home seem- 

 ingly better, while the eldest son, who had spent most of these 

 months at the cottage, returned with them, greatly improved 

 in his general tone. So every thing pointed to the home return- 

 ing to its old-tune happy routine. Mr. Joseph Keeler, as home 

 affairs became less engrossing, reverted naturally to those eco- 

 nomic studies, which seemed now all the more important as he 

 saw then* relationship to moral and social questions, affecting 

 even himself and family. It was just at this moment that the 

 question of his youngest son's future became a factor in the 

 problem. Ernest had shown no inclination for the work in his 

 father's warehouse, and, indeed, for a whole year had been doing 

 little more than making a desultory acquaintance with office 

 methods, which from the first he had found irksome. His love 

 of outdoor life often found him riding in the countryside far 

 beyond the city limits, thereby recalling the two happy days 

 spent with his father on the Lake shore at Brighton at the sea- 

 son when the hillsides were white with apple-blossoms set in 

 then* verdured background, all reflected in the glistening sun- 

 shine of those fair May days down on Presqu' Isle Bay. 



His sometimes laughing suggestion that he ought to be a 

 farmer had been made more than once, and had again and again 

 recurred to his father. So when, on the boy's return from a few 

 days spent with an old school chum in the Niagara Fruit Dis- 



