tion to him to learn to know
something of the spirit of young bloods, seeing that he had the nominal
charge of one, and to preach his sermon in secret, if he would be
sermonizing out of church. The good gentleman had not exactly understood
his duties, or how to conduct them. Far from objecting to find me in
company with my father, as he would otherwise have done by transmitting
information of that fact to Riversley, he now congratulated himself
on it, and after the two had conversed apart, cordially agreed to our
scheme of travelling together. The squire had sickened him. I believe
that by comparison he saw in my father a better friend of youth.

'We shall not be the worse for a ghostly adviser at hand,' my father
said to me with his quaintest air of gravity and humour mixed, which was
not insincerely grave, for the humour was unconscious. 'An accredited
casuist may frequently be a treasure. And I avow it, I like to travel
with my private chaplain.'

Mr. Peterborough's temporary absence had allowed me time for getting
ample funds placed at our disposal through the agency of my father's
solicitors, Messrs. Dettermain and Newson, whom I already knew from
certain transactions with them on his behalf. They were profoundly
courteous to me, and showed me his box, and alluded to his Case--a long
one, and a lamentable, I was taught to apprehend, by their lugubriously
professional tone about it. The question was naturally prompted in me,
'Why do you not go on with it?'

'Want of funds.'

'There's no necessity to name that now,' I insisted. But my father
desired them to postpone any further exposition of the case, saying,
'Pleasure first, business by-and-by. That, I take it, is in the order
of our great mother Nature, gentlemen. I will not have him help shoulder
his father's pack until he has had his, fill of entertainment.'

A smooth voyage brought us in view of the towers of Ostend at sunrise.
Standing with my father on deck, and gazing on this fringe of the grand
romantic Continent, I remembered our old travels, and felt myself bound
to him indissolubly, ashamed of my recent critical probings of
his character. My boy's love for him returned in full force. I was
sufficiently cognizant of his history to know that he kept his
head erect, lighted by the fire of his robust heart in the thick of
overhanging natal clouds. As the way is with men when they are too happy
to be sentimental, I chattered of anything but my feelings.