it. Mrs. Portheris's nephew was just fourteen
and small of his age, but he, too, had selected the lady of his
admiration, and was taking regular daily pedestrian exercise in front of
her residence. He pointed out the residence, and observed with an
enormous frown that "another man" had usurped the pavement in his
absence, and was doing it in quick step doubtless to show his ardour.
"He's a beastly German too," said Mrs. Portheris's nephew, "so I can't
challenge him, but I'll jolly well punch his head."

"Come on," said Dicky, "you'd better steady your nerves," and treated
him liberally to ginger-beer and currant buns; but we were not allowed
to see the encounter, which Mr. Jarvis Portheris, gratefully satiate,
assured us must be conducted on strict lines of etiquette, with formal
preliminaries. He was so very young, and obviously knew so little about
what he was doing, that we questioned him with some delicacy, but we
discovered that the practice had no parallel, as Dicky put it, for lack
of incident. It was accompanied in some cases by the writing of poetry,
"German poetry, of course," said Mrs. Portheris's nephew ineffably, but
even that was more likely to be exhibited as evidence of the writer's
fervid state of mind than to be sent to its object, who plaited her
hair and attended to her domestic duties as if nobody were in the street
but the fishmonger. In Mr. Jarvis Portheris's case he did not know the
colour of her eyes, or the number of her years; he had selected her, it
seemed, at a venture, in church, from a rear view, sitting; and had
never seen her since. Dicky, whose predilections of this sort have
always been very active, asked him seriously why he adhered to such a
hollow mockery, and he said regretfully that a fellow more or less had
to; it was one of the beastly nuisances of being educated abroad. But
from what we saw of the German temperament generally we were convinced
that as a native demonstration it was sincere, and that its idiocy arose
only, as Dicky expressed it, from the remarkable lack in foreigners of
business capacity.

We all congratulated ourselves on seeing Heidelberg while the University
was in session, and we could observe the large fat students in flat blue
and pink and green club caps, swaggering about the town accompanied by
dogs of almost equal importance. The largest and fattest, I thought,
wore white caps, and, though Mr. Jarvis Portheris said that white was
the most aristocratic