d
alongside in dock, the kerbstone playing the part of the quay. Boys
will then accumulate, and undervalue your appearance and belongings.
And impossible persons, with no previous or subsequent existence, will
endeavour to see their way to the establishment of a claim on you. And
you will be rather grateful than otherwise that a policeman without
active interests should accrue, and communicate to them the virus of
dispersal, however long its incubation may be. You will then probably
do as Dr. Vereker did, and resent the driver's disappearance. The
boys, mysteriously in his, each other's, and the policeman's
confidence (all to your exclusion), will be able to quicken his
movements, and he will come trooping from the horizon, on or beyond
which is Somebody's Entire.

All this came to pass in due course, and the horse, deprived of his
nosebag, returned to his professional obligations. But it was a shabby
horse in a shabby cab, to which he imparted movement by falling
forwards and saving himself just before he reached the ground. His
reins were visibly made good with stout pack-thread, and he had a
well-founded contempt for his whip, which seemed to come to an end
too soon, and always to hit something wooden before it reached any
sensitive part of his person. But he did get off at last, and showed
that, as Force is a mode of motion, so Weakness is a mode of slowness,
and one he took every advantage of.

The mother and daughter stood looking after the vanishing label, that
stated that the complication of inefficiencies in front of it was one
of twelve thousand and odd--pray Heaven, more competent ones!--in the
Metropolis, and had nearly turned to go into the house, when the very
much younger sister (that might have been) addressed the very much,
but not impossibly, older one thus:

"Mamma, he said he knew somebody of our name!"

"Well, Miss Fiddlestick!"--with an implication of what of that? Were
there not plenty of Nightingales in the world? Miss Sally is perceptive
about this.

"Yes, but he said Rosalind."

"Where?"

"He didn't say where. That's all he said--Rosalind."

As the two stand together watching the retreating cab we are able to
see that our first impression of them, derived perhaps from their
relative ages only, was an entirely false one as far as size went. The
daughter is nearly as tall as her mother, and may end by being as big
a woman when she has completely graduated, taken her degree, in
womanho