but the amount extorted from him, at last, was generally in
direct ratio with the length of the siege and the stubbornness of the
resistance. In charity no one gave more liberally or with a worse grace.

For the fine arts, and especially for the belles-lettres, he entertained
a profound contempt. With this he had been inspired by Casimir Perier,
whose pert little query "A quoi un poete est il bon?" he was in the
habit of quoting, with a very droll pronunciation, as the ne plus ultra
of logical wit. Thus my own inkling for the Muses had excited his entire
displeasure. He assured me one day, when I asked him for a new copy of
Horace, that the translation of "Poeta nascitur non fit" was "a nasty
poet for nothing fit"--a remark which I took in high dudgeon. His
repugnance to "the humanities" had, also, much increased of late, by
an accidental bias in favor of what he supposed to be natural science.
Somebody had accosted him in the street, mistaking him for no less a
personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics.
This set him off at a tangent; and just at the epoch of this story--for
story it is getting to be after all--my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon was
accessible and pacific only upon points which happened to chime in with
the caprioles of the hobby he was riding. For the rest, he laughed with
his arms and legs, and his politics were stubborn and easily understood.
He thought, with Horsley, that "the people have nothing to do with the
laws but to obey them."

I had lived with the old gentleman all my life. My parents, in dying,
had bequeathed me to him as a rich legacy. I believe the old villain
loved me as his own child--nearly if not quite as well as he loved
Kate--but it was a dog's existence that he led me, after all. From my
first year until my fifth, he obliged me with very regular floggings.
From five to fifteen, he threatened me, hourly, with the House of
Correction. From fifteen to twenty, not a day passed in which he did not
promise to cut me off with a shilling. I was a sad dog, it is true--but
then it was a part of my nature--a point of my faith. In Kate, however,
I had a firm friend, and I knew it. She was a good girl, and told me
very sweetly that I might have her (plum and all) whenever I could
badger my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon, into the necessary consent. Poor
girl!--she was barely fifteen, and without this consent, her little
amount in the funds was not come-at-able until five immeasurabl