, has drawn to its
close.

"If your estimate, sir, approaches to correctness," rejoined
Matey--tellingly, his comrades thought.

"Sixty, as you may learn some day, is a serious age, Matthew Weyburn."

Matey said he should be happy to reach it with half the honours Lord
Ormont had won.

"Excepting the duels," Shalders had the impudence to say.

"If the cause is a good one!" cried Matey.

"The cause, or Lord Ormont has been maligned, was reprehensible in the
extremest degree." Shalders cockhorsed on his heels to his toes and back
with a bang.

"What was the cause, if you please, sir?" a boy, probably naughty,
inquired; and as Shalders did not vouchsafe a reply, the bigger boys
knew.

They revelled in the devilish halo of skirts on the whirl encircling Lord
Ormont's laurelled head.

That was a spark in their blood struck from a dislike of the tone assumed
by Mr. Shalders to sustain his argument; with his "men are mortal," and
talk of a true living champion as "no chicken," and the wordy drawl over
"justification for calculating the approach of a close to a term of
activity"--in the case of a proved hero!

Guardians of boys should make sure that the boys are on their side before
they raise the standard of virtue. Nor ought they to summon morality for
support of a polemic. Matey Weyburn's object of worship rode superior to
a morality puffing its phrasy trumpet. And, somehow, the sacrifice of an
enormous number of women to Lord Ormont's glory seemed natural; the very
thing that should be, in the case of a first-rate military hero and
commander--Scipio notwithstanding. It brightens his flame, and it is
agreeable to them. That is how they come to distinction: they have no
other chance; they are only women; they are mad to be singed, and they
rush pelf-mall, all for the honour of the candle.

Shortly after this discussion Matey was heard informing some of the
bigger fellows he could tell them positively that Lord Ormont's age was
under fifty-four--the prime of manhood, and a jolly long way off death!
The greater credit to him, therefore, if he bad been a name in the world
for anything like the period Shalders insinuated, "to get himself out of
a sad quandary." Matey sounded the queer word so as to fix it sticking to
the usher, calling him Mr. Peter Bell Shalders, at which the boys roared,
and there was a question or two about names, which belonged to verses,
for people caring to read poems.

To the joy of the sch