oven, drawled out in a voice which everybody could hear, "Oh,
you'll find your things in the bath-room--all but your shirt. I really
couldn't touch _that_, so it's lying on the river bank still, where you
left it!"

There is one peculiarity about dandies. They are hardly ever persons of
great minds. When the exquisite, on being asked how on earth he came by
the wonderful necktie he had got on, replied, "Well, you see, I gave my
whole mind to it!" he probably spoke the truth. But then you know a
mind that exhausts all its energy in the production of a "choker,"
however remarkable, cannot be a great one.

I should be sorry to hurt any one's feelings, but it is nevertheless a
fact that an unhealthy craving after finery is very often a symptom of
something not very far short of idiocy. I do not mean to say Fred Fop
was an idiot. He had a certain amount of sense; but he would have had a
vast deal more if he had not given so much of his mind to the decoration
of his person. And with it all he never succeeded, at school at any
rate, in passing himself off for any one more important than he was. It
is as much a sign of being no gentleman to over-dress as to dress like a
sloven, but, as in every other case, the secret is to find the golden
mean. I have often seen working-men dressed in a more gentlemanly way
than certain gorgeous snobs of my acquaintance; not that their clothes
were grander or cost more, but because they were _neat_. That really is
the secret. It always seems to me a sign of a man being well dressed
when one never notices how he is dressed at all. If he were badly
dressed, or if he were over-dressed, one would notice it; and it is a
sure sign of his having hit the happy mean when his dress leaves no
impression on your mind at all.

But I am not going to set up as a tailor, and so I will bring this paper
to a close with this one piece of advice; when there is nothing else
left to think about, then by all means let us give our whole mind to the
cut of our coats.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

THE GROWLER.

Who doesn't know Growler, of our school? He was a sort of fellow
nothing and nobody could satisfy. If Growler were a week in an African
desert without a drop of water to drink, and some one were then to come
and offer him a draught, you may depend upon it the fellow would have
something to find fault with. The rim of the bowl would be too thick,
or there would be a flavour of sand in the water, o