s approaching, or has approached, or, in fact, has
drawn to its close.

"If your estimate, sir, approaches to correctness," rejoined
Matey--tellingly, his comrades thought.

"Sixty, as you may learn some day, is a serious age, Matthew Weyburn."

Matey said he should be happy to reach it with half the honours Lord
Ormont had won.

"Excepting the duels," Shalders had the impudence to say.

"If the cause is a good one!" cried Matey.

"The cause, or Lord Ormont has been maligned, was reprehensible in the
extremest degree." Shalders cockhorsed on his heels to his toes and back
with a bang.

"What was the cause, if you please, sir?" a boy, probably naughty,
inquired; and as Shalders did not vouchsafe a reply, the bigger boys
knew.

They revelled in the devilish halo of skirts on the whirl encircling
Lord Ormont's laurelled head.

That was a spark in their blood struck from a dislike of the tone
assumed by Mr. Shalders to sustain his argument; with his "men are
mortal," and talk of a true living champion as "no chicken," and the
wordy drawl over "justification for calculating the approach of a close
to a term of activity"--in the case of a proved hero!

Guardians of boys should make sure that the boys are on their side
before they raise the standard of virtue. Nor ought they to summon
morality for support of a polemic. Matey Weyburn's object of worship
rode superior to a morality puffing its phrasy trumpet. And, somehow,
the sacrifice of an enormous number of women to Lord Ormont's glory
seemed natural; the very thing that should be, in the case of a
first-rate military hero and commander--Scipio notwithstanding. It
brightens his flame, and it is agreeable to them. That is how they come
to distinction: they have no other chance; they are only women; they
are mad to be singed, and they rush pelf-mall, all for the honour of the
candle.

Shortly after this discussion Matey was heard informing some of the
bigger fellows he could tell them positively that Lord Ormont's age was
under fifty-four--the prime of manhood, and a jolly long way off death!
The greater credit to him, therefore, if he had been a name in the world
for anything like the period Shalders insinuated, "to get himself out of
a sad quandary." Matey sounded the queer word so as to fix it sticking
to the usher, calling him Mr. Peter Bell Shalders, at which the boys
roared, and there was a question or two about names, which belonged to
verses, for people