e time to
reflect." Then, turning towards his mother, he said, "Conqueror or
Jack Pudding, mother, you shall always find me a dutiful son."

His mother was more gratified by this expression of attachment than
she would have been had he laid at her feet the four thousand golden
spurs found, in 1302, on the field of Courtray.

"And now, Ernest, what profession do you intend to adopt? what is
your dream of the future?"

"I, Mr. Wolston! Well, having no taste for artillery, brilliant
charges, blood-stained ruins, and the other _agremens_ of war, I
cannot be a hero. Do you know when I feel most happy?"

"No, let us hear."

"It is towards evening, when I am reposing tranquilly on the banks of
the Jackal."

"Ah, I thought so," cried Jack; "no position so congenial to the true
philosopher as the horizontal."

"When the sun," continued Ernest, gravely, "is retiring behind the
forest of cedars that bounds the horizon; when the palms, the mangoes,
and gum trees, mass their verdure in distinct and isolated groups;
when nature is making herself heard in a thousand melodious voices;
when the hum of the insect is ringing in my ears, and the breeze is
gently murmuring through the foliage; when thousands of birds are
fluttering from grove to grove, sometimes breaking with their wings
the smooth surface of the river; when the fish, leaping out of their
own element, reflect for an instant from their silvery scales the
departing rays of the sun; when the sea, stretching away like a vast
plain of boundless space, loses itself in the distance, then my eyes
and thoughts are sometimes turned upwards towards the azure of the
firmament, and sometimes towards the objects around me, and I feel as
if my mind were in search of something which has hitherto eluded its
grasp, but which it is sure of eventually finding. Under these
circumstances, I assure you, I would not exchange the moss on which I
sat for the greatest throne in Christendom."

"But surely you do not call such a poetical exordium a profession?"
remarked Becker.

"It must be admitted," said Wolston, "that the sun and trees have
their uses, especially when the one protects us from the other; the
sun, for example, dries up the moisture that falls from the trees, and
the trees shelter us from the burning rays of the sun. Still, I am at
a loss myself to connect these things with a profession in a social
point of view."

"What would you have thought," inquired Ernest, "if you h