people would be to avoid him and
give him a wide berth! For, assuredly, if in anything there was to be
found a fault, Growler was the boy to find it. I remember a fairy tale
about some folk who wanted to find out if a certain lady were a fairy
princess or not; and the way they did it was to lay a pea on the floor
of her room, and cover it with twenty feather beds one on the top of the
other. Next morning they asked how she slept.

"Not at all," said she, "for there was a dreadful lump in the bed."

Then they knew she must be a fairy! Perhaps it would be a little too
much to compare Growler with a fairy; but he certainly had a wonderful
knack of discovering peas under the bed; and where there were none to
discover, he found out something else. Now, you and I, I expect, in
talking of the sun, would speak of it as a glorious light and heat-
giving orb, without which we could none of us get on for a moment. But
Growler's version of the thing would be quite different.

"A thing full of great ugly spots, that goes scorching up one part of
the earth and leaving another in the cold, and is generally hidden by
clouds from all the rest."

Such is the genial, bright view of things taken by our old schoolmate.

There are two sorts of growlers. There is the man who honestly attacks
what is really wrong for the sake of making it right, and there is the
man who instinctively grumbles at everything for the mere sake of
growling. The former class is as useful as the latter is tiresome, and
if we must growl, by all means let us find out some real grievance to
attack. Grumbling is a habit that grows quickly and with very little
encouragement, and those who go in for it must make up their minds to
have to do with very few friends. For who would consent to be the
friend of a growler? It would be as bad as becoming the servant of a
man who kept an electrical machine--he would always be trying it on you!
And he must be content also to find that very few people sympathise
with him. For when a man is a confirmed grumbler at everything, no one
afflicts himself much about his lamentations, but puts it all down to
his infirmity.

"Poor fellow, his digestion isn't good, or his liver's out of order!"
they will say, and think no more about it.

Growler of our school was an able fellow in his way; and successful,
too, but he wasn't liked. Some were afraid of him, some detested him,
and most cared very little about him. I don't su