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Three families—the Jamesons, the Gordons, and the Baynets—are principally concerned in this story. All three were originally English yeomen; country, not county folk; probably peasants—in the best sense of the word. In the Jamesons and the Gordons there is an admixture of exotic Hebraic blood: that of the Señora Elvira de Miranda y Miraflores, who married a Captain Bradley of the British West India Regiment, then stationed in Jamaica, and had by him two daughters, one of whom married Peter’s father in 1880, and the other—some three years later—John Gordon, father of Peter’s cousin, Francis Gordon. The Baynet stock is pure English.

Peter’s grandfather—Peter the First—deserted the country for the town at the beginning of the great manufacturing age (about 1840); married a “cit’s” daughter; tried his luck in the City; couldn’t stand it; and wandered out to the West Indies, trading first at Georgetown, Demarara, then in Bridgetown, Barbados; and finally settling down in the then Spanish colony of Cuba, where he bought a small estate near Guanabacoa, and grew tobacco—more for a hobby than a living, as he was a person of few wants, and tolerably careless about most things except his son, Peter the Second, whom he had educated in England, and to whom—on his death in the late seventies—he bequeathed the sum of £3,000, the verandah’d hacienda, and some hundred acres of not very saleable land.

It was on the Royal Mail steamer to Havana that our Peter’s father—thinking more of the newly acquired heritage and how best to turn it into cash, than of matrimony—first met Captain and Mrs. Bradley (née Miranda y Miraflores) returning with their two flapper-daughters to Kingston, Jamaica. …

To cut a long story short, Peter the Second sold the tobacco-farm; found himself in love with Tessa Bradley; followed her to Jamaica; married her; realized that the interest on his capital could not possibly support them in comfort; and returned to England in the spring of 1882 with his wife, his wife’s sister (who found garrison-life in the tropics hardly to her taste), and twenty cases of Señor Larranaga’s very best “Principes” in which he had invested a considerable amount of money, and of which he subsequently disposed, owing to the machinations of his brokers and ignorance of the imported cigar trade, at a very unsatisfactory profit.

But Peter the Second—like his son Peter the Third, hero of this story—was an obstinate devil who disliked being beaten, especially over money. Taking—from an old school friend, John Gordon (who may have had ulterior motives in granting the facilities), a little room in the big, dingy offices of Gordon’s Limited, General Merchants, he imported another consignment of Havana cigars; had them sampled; hired a brougham; and hawked (he was, although he had married an officer’s daughter, by no means a snob) his sample-boxes round the West End tobacconist shops until he had disposed of his second shipment at a very different figure to that received on the first.

So began the firm of “P. Jameson & Company, Cigar Importers,” which—aided by the financial support of John Gordon (who married Dolores Bradley very shortly after that second shipment had been disposed of) and the boom-crop of 1884—soon needed offices of its own, two clerks, a country salesman, and all the paraphernalia of a regular business. It was not, of course—never would be—a huge affair like Gordon’s, who dealt the world over and in every conceivable commodity from quinine to molasses—still it was a solid, money-making, not too arduous concern; and, moreover, both Peter’s father and his salesman, Tom Simpson, whom he subsequently took into junior partnership, needed considerably less to live on than the profit which it earned.