country heights,
went to theatres, and had a most pleasurable time, gaining everywhere
front places, friendly smiles, kind little services, in a way that would
have been incomprehensible to me but for my consciousness of the magical
influence of my father's address, a mixture of the ceremonious and the
affable such as the people could not withstand.

'The poet is perhaps, on the whole, more exhilarating than the alderman,'
he said.

These were the respective names given by him to the empty purse and the
full purse. We vowed we preferred the poet.

'Ay,' said he, 'but for all that the alderman is lighter on his feet: I
back him to be across the Channel first. The object of my instructions to
you will be lost, Richie, if I find you despising the Alderman's Pegasus.
On money you mount. We are literally chained here, you know, there is no
doubt about it; and we are adding a nail to our fetters daily. True, you
are accomplishing the Parisian accent. Paris has also this immense
advantage over all other cities: 'tis the central hotel on the high-road
of civilization. In Paris you meet your friends to a certainty; it
catches them every one in turn; so now we must abroad early and late, and
cut for trumps.' A meeting with a friend of my father, Mr. Monterez
Williams, was the result of our resolute adoption of this system. He
helped us on to Boulogne, where my father met another friend, to whom he
gave so sumptuous a dinner that we had not money enough to pay the hotel
bill.

'Now observe the inconvenience of leaving Paris,' said he. 'Ten to one we
shall have to return. We will try a week's whistling on the jetty; and if
no luck comes, and you will admit, Richie--Mr. Temple, I call your
attention to it--that luck will scarcely come in profuse expedition
through the narrow neck of a solitary seaport, why, we must return to
Paris.'

I proposed to write to my aunt Dorothy for money, but he would not hear
of that. After two or three days of whistling, I saw my old friend, Mr.
Bannerbridge, step out of the packetboat. On condition of my writing to
my aunt to say that I was coming home, he advanced me the sum we were in
need of, grudgingly though, and with the prediction that we should break
down again, which was verified. It occurred only a stage from Riversley,
where my grandfather's name was good as coin of the realm. Besides, my
father remained at the inn to guarantee the payment of the bill, while
Temple and I pushed on in