ee no more of your vile corruptions!
Mein Gott! Pi! ven de name is Pei!"

The next time I wrote home to my father, modestly implying that I
was short of cash, that a trap-bat would be acceptable, and that the
favorite goddess amongst the boys (whether Greek or Roman was very
immaterial) was Diva Moneta, I felt a glow of classical pride in signing
myself "your affectionate Peisistratos." The next post brought a sad
damper to my scholastic exultation. The letter ran thus:--

My Dear Son,--I prefer my old acquaintances Thucydides and
Pisistratus to Thoukudides and Peisistratos. Horace is familiar to
me, but Horatius is only known to me as Cocles. Pisistratus can
play at trap-ball; but I find no authority in pure Greek to allow
me to suppose that that game was known to Peisistratos. I should
be too happy to send you a drachma or so, but I have no coins in my
possession current at Athens at the time when Pisistratus was spelt
Peisistratos.--Your affectionate father,
A. CAXTON.

Verily, here indeed was the first practical embarrassment produced
by that melancholy anachronism which my father had so prophetically
deplored. However, nothing like experience to prove the value of
compromise in this world. Peisistratos continued to write exercises, and
a second letter from Pisistratus was followed by the trap-bat.

CHAPTER II.

I was somewhere about sixteen when, on going home for the holidays, I
found my mother's brother settled among the household Lares. Uncle
Jack, as he was familiarly called, was a light-hearted, plausible,
enthusiastic, talkative fellow, who had spent three small fortunes in
trying to make a large one.

Uncle Jack was a great speculator; but in all his speculations he
never affected to think of himself,--it was always the good of his
fellow-creatures that he had at heart, and in this ungrateful world
fellow-creatures are not to be relied upon! On coming of age, he
inherited L6,000, from his maternal grandfather. It seemed to him then
that his fellow-creatures were sadly imposed upon by their tailors.
Those ninth parts of humanity notoriously eked out their fractional
existence by asking nine times too much for the clothing which
civilization, and perhaps a change of climate, render more necessary to
us than to our predecessors, the Picts. Out of pure philanthropy, Uncle
Jack started a "Grand National Benevolent Clothing Company," which
undertook to