an we
are; and yet, when I spent the day with young Brown, we cooked all sorts
of messes in the afternoon; and he wasted twice as much rum and brandy
and lemons in his trash as I should want to make good punch of. He was
quite surprised, too, when I told him that our mince-pies were kept shut
up in the larder, and only brought out at meal-times, and then just one
apiece; he said they had mince-pies always going, and he got one
whenever he liked. Old Brown never blows up about that sort of thing; he
likes Adolphus to enjoy himself in the holidays, particularly at
Christmas."

The speaker was a boy--if I may be allowed to use the word in speaking
of an individual whose jackets had for some time past been resigned to a
younger member of his family, and who daily, in the privacy of his own
apartment, examined his soft cheeks by the aid of his sisters'
"back-hair glass." He was a handsome boy, too; tall, and like
David--"ruddy, and of a fair countenance;" and his face, though clouded
then, bore the expression of general amiability. He was the eldest son
in a large young family, and was being educated at one of the best
public schools. He did not, it must be confessed, think either small
beer or small beans of himself; and as to the beer and beans that his
family thought of him, I think it was pale ale and kidney-beans at
least.

When the lords of the creation of all ages can find nothing else to do,
they generally take to eating and drinking; and so it came to pass that
our hero had set his mind upon brewing a jorum of punch, and sipping it
with an accompaniment of mince-pies; and Paterfamilias had not been
quietly settled to his writing for half an hour, when he was disturbed
by an application for the necessary ingredients. These he had refused,
quietly explaining that he could not afford to waste his French brandy,
etc., in school-boy cookery, and ending with, "You see the reason, my
dear boy?"

To which the dear boy replied as above, and concluded with the
disrespectful (not to say ungrateful) hint, "Old Brown never blows up
about that sort of thing; he likes Adolphus to enjoy himself in the
holidays."

Whereupon Paterfamilias made answer, in the mildly deprecating tone in
which the elder sometimes do answer the younger in these topsy-turvy
days:--

"That's quite a different case. Don't you see, my boy, that Adolphus
Brown is an only son, and you have nine brothers and sisters? If you
have punch and mince-meat to