f he had run against a fence. His favorite
advice went straight home to him.

"Very good, my child," said he, turning to Corny. "That's just what I'll
do."

And he said no more about it.

Now, everybody began to talk about all sorts of things, so as to seem as
if they hadn't noticed this little rumpus, and we agreed that we must
all see each other again the next day. Father said he should remain in
the city for a few days, now that we were all here, and Uncle Chipperton
did not intend to go to his country-place until the weather was warmer.
We were speaking of several things that would be pleasant to do
together, when Uncle Chipperton broke in with a proposition:

"I'll tell you what I am going to do. I am going to give a dinner to
this party. I can't invite you to my house, but I shall engage a parlor
in a restaurant, where I have given dinners before (we always come to
New York when I want to give dinners--it's so much easier for us to come
to the city than for a lot of people to come out to our place), and
there I shall give you a dinner, to-morrow evening. Nobody need say
anything against this. I've settled it, and I can't be moved."

As he couldn't be moved, no one tried to move him.

"I tell you what it is," said Rectus privately to me. "If Uncle
Chipperton is going to give a dinner, according to his own ideas of
things in general, it will be a curious kind of a meal."

It often happened that Rectus was as nearly right as most people.

CHAPTER XXIII.

UNCLE CHIPPERTON'S DINNER.

The next day was a busy one for father and mother and myself. All the
morning we were out, laying in a small stock of baggage, to take the
place of what I had lost on the "Tigris." But I was very sorry,
especially on my sister Helen's account, that I had lost so many things
in my trunk which I could not replace, without going back myself to
Nassau. I could buy curiosities from those regions that were ever so
much better than any that I had collected; but I could not buy shells
that I myself had gathered, nor great seed-pods, like bean-pods two feet
long, which I had picked from the trees, nor pieces of rock that I
myself had brought up from a coral-reef.

But these were all gone, and I pacified Helen by assuring her that I
would tell her such long stories about these things that she could
almost see them in her mind's eye. But I think, by the way she smiled,
that she had only a second-rate degree of belief in my power