t amount to anything along any business or
professional line. Only last spring I met the father of a second-year
man who remembers Uncle Louis well, said he was a classmate of his. He
told me he was banner man every time and no end popular; the others
didn't have a show with him."

His mother was silent. Champney, apparently unheeding her
unresponsiveness, rose quickly, shook himself together, and suddenly
burst into a mighty laughter that is best comparable to the
inextinguishable species of the blessed gods. He laughed in arpeggios,
peal on peal, crescendo and diminuendo, until, finally, he flung himself
down on the short turf and in his merriment rolled over and over. He
brought himself right side up at last, tears in his eyes and a sigh of
satisfying exhaustion on his lips. To his mother's laughing query:

"What is it now, Champney?" He shook his head as if words failed him;
then he said huskily:

"It's Aunt Meda's _protegee_. Oh, Great Scott! She'll be the death by
shock of some of the Champo people if she stays another three months. I
hear Aunt Meda has had her Waterloo. Tavy buttonholed me out in the
carriage house yesterday, and told me the whole thing--oh, but it's
rich!" He chuckled again. "He got me to feel his vest; says he can lap
it three inches already and she has only been here two weeks; and as
for Romanzo, he's neither to have nor to hold when the girl's in
sight--wits topsy-turvy, actually, oh, Lord!"--he rolled over again on
the grass--"what do you think, mother! She got Roman to scour down
Jim--you know, the white cart-horse, the Percheron--with Hannah's
cleaning powder, and the girl helped him, and together they got one side
done and then waited for it to dry to see how it worked. Result: Tave
dead ashamed to drive him in the cart for fear some one will see the
yellow-white calico-circus horse, that the two rapscallions have left on
his hands, and doesn't want Aunt Meda to know it for fear she'll turn
down Roman. He says he's going to put Jim out to grass in the Colonel's
back sheep pasture, and when Aunt Meda comes home lie about sudden
spavin or something. And the joke of it is Roman takes it all as a part
of the play, and has owned up to Tave that, by mistake, he blacked Aunt
Meda's walking boots, before she went to Hallsport, with axle grease,
while the girl was 'telling novels' to him! Tave said Roman told him she
knew a lot of the nobility, marchionesses and 'sich'; and now Roman
struts ar