and her handwriting when a girl, was enough to rouse an honest
fellow's laugh at himself, in the contemplation of his intermediate
amorous vagabondage. Had he ever known the veritable passion after Browny
sank from his ken? Let it be confessed, never. His first love was his
only true love, despite one shuddering episode, oddly humiliating to
recollect, though he had not behaved badly. So, then, by right of his
passion, thus did eternal justice rule it: that Browny belonged, to Matey
Weyburn, Aminta to Lord Ormont. Aminta was a lady blooming in the flesh,
Browny was the past's pale phantom; for which reason he could call her
his own, without harm done to any one, and with his usual appetite for
dinner, breakfast, lunch, whatever the meal supplied by the hour.

It would somewhat alarmingly have got to Mr. Weyburn's conscience through
a disturbance of his balance, telling him that he was on a perilous road,
if his relish for food had been blunted. He had his axiom on the subject,
and he was wrong in the general instance, for the appetites of rogues and
ogres are not known to fail. As regarded himself, he was eminently right;
and he could apply it to boys also, to all young people--the unlaunched,
he called them. He counted himself among the launched, no doubt, and had
breasted seas; but the boy was alive, a trencherman lad, in the coming
schoolmaster, and told him profitable facts concerning his condition;
besides throwing a luminous ray on the arcane of our elusive youthful. If
they have no stout zest for eating, put Query against them.

His customary enjoyment of dinner convinced Mr. Weyburn that he had not
brooded morbidly over his phantom Browny, and could meet Aminta, Countess
of Ormont, on the next occasion with the sentiments proper to a common
official. Did she not set him a commendable example? He admired her for
not concealing her disdain of the aspirant schoolmaster, quite
comprehending, by sympathy, why the woman should reproach the girl who
had worshipped heroes, if this was a full-grown specimen; and the reply
of the shamed girl, that in her ignorance she could not know better. He
spared the girl, but he laughed at the woman he commended, laughed at
himself.

Aminta's humour was being stirred about the same time. She and her aunt
were at the dinner-table in the absence of my lord. The dinner had passed
with the stiff dialogue peculiar to couples under supervision of their
inferiors; and, as soon as the room