milk into the substance of little sinners at
a great rate, and growing as if they were put out at compound interest.

This short episode shows us the family conditions surrounding Byles
Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by
Miss Susan Posey.

"I am coming, my dear," he said,--which expression quite touched Miss
Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from
the delicious page he was reading. It was not the living child that was
kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a trivial
use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.

Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his
eye was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of
papers. Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him.
Could that be a copy of "Thoughts on the Universe"? He watched his
opportunity, and got a hurried sight of the volume. His own treatise,
sure enough! Leaves Uncut. Opened of itself to the one hundred and
twentieth page. The axiom Murray Bradshaw had quoted--he did not
remember from what,--"sounded like Coleridge"--was staring him in the
face from that very page. When he remembered how he had pleased himself
with that compliment the other day, he blushed like a school-girl; and
then, thinking out the whole trick,--to hunt up his forgotten book, pick
out a phrase or two from it, and play on his weakness with it, to win
his good opinion,--for what purpose he did not know, but doubtless to
use him in some way,--he grinned with a contempt about equally divided
between himself and the young schemer.

"Ah ha!" he muttered scornfully. "Sounds like Coleridge, hey? Niccolo
Macchiavelli Bradshaw!"

From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with
even more suspicion than before. Yet he would not forego his company and
conversation; for he was very agreeable and amusing to study; and this
trick he had played him was, after all, only a diplomatist's way of
flattering his brother plenipotentiary. Who could say? Some time or
other he might cajole England or France or Russia into a treaty with
just such a trick. Shallower men than he had gone out as ministers of
the great Republic. At any rate, the fellow was worth watching.

CHAPTER VI. THE USE OF SPECTACLES.

The old Master of Arts had a great reputation in the house where he
lived for knowing everything that was going on. He rather enjoyed it;
an