and upright
principles--when you know him well.

"It's an ill wind that blows nobody good," and the fire that burned
down our house got Weston into print at last.

It was not a common letter either, in the "correspondence" part, with
small type, and the editor not responsible. It was a leading article,
printed big, and it was about the fire and Rupert and Henrietta.
Thomas Johnson read it to us, and we did not know who wrote it; but it
was true, and in good taste. After the account of the fire came a
quotation from Horace,

"Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis."

And Johnson cried--"That's Weston, depend upon it. He's in the _Weekly
Spectator_ at last!"

And then, to my utter amazement, came such a chronicle of the valiant
deeds of Rupert's ancestors as Weston could only have got from one
source. What had furnished his ready pen with matter for a comic
ballad to punish my bragging had filled it also to do honour to Rupert
and Henrietta's real bravery, and down to what the colonel of my
father's regiment had said of him--it was all there.

Weston came to see me the other day at Dartmouth, where our
training-ship _Albion_ lies, and he was so charmed by the old town
with its carved and gabled houses, and its luxuriant gardens rich with
pale-blossomed laurels, which no frost dwarfs, and crimson fuchsias
gnarled with age, and its hill-embosomed harbour, where the people of
all grades and ages, and of both sexes, flit hither and thither in
their boats as landlubbers would take an evening stroll--that I felt
somewhat justified in the romantic love I have for the place.

And when we lay in one of the _Albion's_ boats, rocking up and down in
that soothing swell which freshens the harbour's mouth, Weston made me
tell him all about the lion and the silver chain, and he called me a
prig for saying so often that I did not believe in it now. I remember
he said, "In this sleepy, damp, delightful Dartmouth, who but a prig
could deny the truth of a poetical dream?"

He declared he could see the lion in a cave in the rock, and that the
poor beast wanted a new sea-green ribbon.

Weston speaks so much more cleverly than I can, that I could not
explain to him then that I am still but too apt to dream! But the
harbour's mouth is now only the beginning of my visions, which stretch
far over the sea beyond, and over the darker line of that horizon
where the ships come and go.

I hope it is not wrong to dream. My father was so mo