o take an unfair
advantage of anything I say, and tries to make out I wish a thing which
he has himself proposed?"

The Drag said she had noticed it very often, and wondered at it very
much. She thought it was very unfair indeed, and showed a domineering
spirit very far from Christian in her opinion, though, of course,
opinions might differ.

Porkington took a turn in his little back garden, and smoked a pipe,
which seemed to console him somewhat; and, after a few more skirmishes,
the coach, harness, drag, team and all arrived at Babbicombe.

CHAPTER II.--THE TEAM.

Let the man who disapproves of reading parties suggest something better.
"Let the lads stop at home," says one. Have you ever tried it? They
soon become a bore to themselves and all around them. "Let them go by
themselves, then, to some quiet seaside lodging or small farmhouse."
Suicide or the d---1. "Let them stop at the University for the Long."
The Dons won't let them stop up, unless they are likely to take high
degrees; and, even if the Dons would permit it, it would be too
oppressively dull for the young men. "At all events, let reading parties
be really _reading_ parties." Whoever said they should be anything else?
For my part I know nothing in this life equal to reading parties. Do
Jones and Brown, who are perched upon high stools in the city, ever dream
of starting for the Lakes with a ledger each, to enter their accounts and
add up the items by the margin of Derwentwater. Do Bagshaw and Tomkins,
emerging from their dismal chambers in Pump Court, take their Smith's
_Leading Cases_, or their _Archbold_, to Shanklyn or Cowes? Do Sawyer
and Allen study medicine in a villa on the Lake of Geneva? I take it, it
is an invincible sign of the universality of the classics and mathematics
that they will adapt themselves with equal ease to the dreariest of
college rooms or to the most romantic scenery.

Harry Barton, Richard Glenville, Thomas Thornton, and I, made up
Porkington's Reading Party.

Harry Barton's father was a Manchester cotton spinner of great wealth.
Himself a man of no education, beyond such knowledge as he had picked up
in the course of an arduous life, the cotton spinner was not oblivious to
those advantages which ought to accrue to a liberal education; and he
resolved that his son, a fine handsome lad, should not fail in life for
want of them. Young Barton had, therefore, in due course been sent to
Eton and Camford wit