,
what a "row!" he who denied that the very word "row" was sanctioned
by any classic authorities in the English language. He would have to
explain how he came to be found disguised, carefully disguised, in
garments such as no baronet's eldest son--even though that baronet be
the least ancestral man of mark whom it suits the convenience of a First
Minister to recommend to the Sovereign for exaltation over the rank
of Mister--was ever beheld in, unless he had taken flight to the
gold-diggings. Was this a position in which the heir of the Chillinglys,
a distinguished family, whose coat-of-arms dated from the earliest
authenticated period of English heraldry under Edward III. as Three
Fishes _azure_, could be placed without grievous slur on the cold and
ancient blood of the Three Fishes?

And then individually to himself, Kenelm, irrespectively of the Three
Fishes,--what a humiliation! He had put aside his respected father's
deliberate preparations for his entrance into real life; he had
perversely chosen his own walk on his own responsibility; and here,
before half the first day was over, what an infernal scrape he had
walked himself into! and what was his excuse? A wretched little boy,
sobbing and chuckling by turns, and yet who was clever enough to twist
Kenelm Chillingly round his finger; twist _him_, a man who thought
himself so much wiser than his parents,--a man who had gained honours at
the University,--a man of the gravest temperament,--a man of so nicely
critical a turn of mind that there was not a law of art or nature in
which he did not detect a flaw; that he should get himself into this
mess was, to say the least of it, an uncomfortable reflection.

The boy himself, as Kenelm glanced at him from time to time, became
impish and Will-of-the-Wisp-ish. Sometimes he laughed to himself loudly,
sometimes he wept to himself quietly; sometimes, neither laughing nor
weeping, he seemed absorbed in reflection. Twice as they came nearer to
the town of Tor-Hadham, Kenelm nudged the boy, and said, "My boy, I must
talk with you;" and twice the boy, withdrawing his arm from the nudge,
had answered dreamily, "Hush! I am thinking."

And so they entered the town of Tor-Hadham, the cob very much done up.

CHAPTER III.

"NOW, young sir," said Kenelm, in a tone calm, but peremptory,--"now we
are in the town, where am I to take you? and wherever it be, there to
say good-by."

"No, not good-by. Stay with me a little bit. I b