66 
THE STORY OE THE OAK TREE 
To inherit means to receive by nature from one's an¬ 
cestors. If you want to get that red hair out of your 
family—which I think would be a mistake, because red 
hair is beautiful—you must be sure to marry a black 
haired gentleman, like Mr. Mantilini in Dicken’s story 
of “Nicholas Nickleby.” 
Sometimes these family traits are so stubborn they 
will not be subdued, but crop out at the most unex¬ 
pected times after skipping a generation or two. Per¬ 
haps you have seen pictures of the Spanish kings, Philip 
Second, Third and Fourth. Because they were kings, 
and rich, artists were eager to paint their portraits. A 
wonderfully skillful artist named Velasquez, a Spaniard, 
painted Philip the Fourth’s portrait forty times! And 
yet, if Philip had not been a king, I doubt if Velasquez 
could have been bribed to paint him, because he was so 
homely. He had a long nose and a still longer chin, 
and his ugly thick under-lip protruded in a perpetual 
pout. Poor Philip the Fourth! He couldn’t help that 
heavy lip, he came by it naturally from his Austrian 
forebears, the Hapsburgs, and in the Hapsburg family 
that lip was so persistent in its reappearance that it is 
still known as the “Hapsburg lip.” 
There are some very queer kinks in this business of 
inheritance and cross-fertiliation. Things don’t always 
work out the way they are expected to. For instance, if 
