nt of old, with his Bible in his
hand, and no spot on his robe. Let him see fairly what is, not stay here
to dream of what is not. And when he's of age, ma'am, we must get him
an object, a pursuit; start him for the county, and make him serve the
State. He will understand that business pretty well. Tush! tush! what is
there to cry at?"

The captain prevailed. We don't say that his advice would have been
equally judicious for all youths of Percival's age; but he knew well
the nature to which he confided; he knew well how strong was that young
heart in its healthful simplicity and instinctive rectitude; and he
appreciated his manliness not too highly when he felt that all evident
props and aids would be but irritating tokens of distrust.

And thus, armed only with letters of introduction, his mother's tearful
admonitions, and Greville's experienced warnings, Percival St. John was
launched into London life. After the first month or so, Greville came
up to visit him, do him sundry kind, invisible offices amongst his
old friends, help him to equip his apartments, and mount his stud; and
wholly satisfied with the result of his experiment, returned in high
spirits, with flattering reports, to the anxious mother.

But, indeed, the tone of Percival's letters would have been sufficient
to allay even maternal anxiety. He did not write, as sons are apt to
do, short excuses for not writing more at length, unsatisfactory
compressions of details (exciting worlds of conjecture) into a hurried
sentence. Frank and overflowing, those delightful epistles gave accounts
fresh from the first impressions of all he saw and did. There was a
racy, wholesome gusto in his enjoyment of novelty and independence. His
balls and his dinners and his cricket at Lord's, his partners and his
companions, his general gayety, his occasional ennui, furnished ample
materials to one who felt he was corresponding with another heart, and
had nothing to fear or to conceal.

But about two months before this portion of our narrative opens with
the coronation, Lady Mary's favourite sister, who had never married,
and who, by the death of her parents, was left alone in the worse than
widowhood of an old maid, had been ordered to Pisa for a complaint
that betrayed pulmonary symptoms; and Lady Mary, with her usual
unselfishness, conquered both her aversion to movement and her wish to
be in reach of her son, to accompany abroad this beloved and solitary
relative. Captai