se. Is the thing settled?"

"Quite, as far as I am concerned."

My father rubbed his head all over with both hands, took off his
spectacles, and walked up and down the room. By these signs he expressed
any unusual degree of satisfaction. All at once he stopped, looked me
full in the face, and said:--

"Understand me, Basil. I require one thing in return."

"If that thing be industry, sir, I think I may promise that you shall
not have cause to complain,"

My father shook his head.

"Not industry," he said; "not industry alone. Keep good company, my boy.
Keep good hours. Never forget that a gentleman must look like a
gentleman, dress like a gentleman, frequent the society of gentlemen. To
be a mere bookworm is to be a drone in the great hive. I hate a
drone--as I hate a sloven."

"I understand you, father," I faltered, blushing. "I know that of late
I--I have not...."

My father laid his hand suddenly over my mouth.

"No confessions--no apologies," he said hastily. "We have both been to
blame in more respects than one, and we shall both know how to be wiser
in the future. Now go, and consider all that you may require for
your journey."

Agitated, delighted, full of hope, I ran up to my own room, locked the
door, and indulged in a delightful reverie. What a prospect had suddenly
opened before me! What novelty! what adventure! To have visited London
would have been to fulfil all my desires; but to be sent to Paris was to
receive a passport for Fairyland!

That day, for the first time in many months, I dressed myself carefully,
and went down to dinner with a light heart, a cheerful face, and an
unexceptionable neckcloth.

As I took my place at the table, my father looked up cheerily and gave
me a pleased nod of recognition.

Our meal passed off very silently. It was my father's maxim that no man
could do more than one thing well at a time--especially at table; so we
had contracted a habit which to strangers would have seemed even more
unsociable than it really was, and gave to all our meals an air more
penitential than convivial. But this day was, in reality, a festive
occasion, and my father was disposed to be more than usually agreeable.
When the cloth was removed, he flung the cellar-key at my head, and
exclaimed, in a burst of unexampled good-humor:--

"Basil, you dog, fetch up a bottle of the particular port!"

Now it is one of my theories that a man's after-dinner talk takes much
of its weight, colo