ven those who cheated him, trusted him. Nevertheless, as we have
hinted, the lad was by no means the artless stripling he seemed to be.
He was knowing enough with all his blushing cheeks; perhaps more wily
and wary than he grew to be in after-age. Sure, a shrewd and generous
man (who has led an honest life and has no secret blushes for his
conscience) grows simpler as he grows older; arrives at his sum of
right by more rapid processes of calculation; learns to eliminate false
arguments more readily, and hits the mark of truth with less previous
trouble of aiming, and disturbance of mind. Or is it only a senile
delusion, that some of our vanities are cured with our growing years,
and that we become more just in our perceptions of our own and our
neighbour's shortcomings? ... I would humbly suggest that young people,
though they look prettier, have larger eyes, and not near so many
wrinkles about their eyelids, are often as artful as some of their
elders. What little monsters of cunning your frank schoolboys are!
How they cheat mamma! how they hoodwink papa! how they humbug the
housekeeper! how they cringe to the big boy for whom they fag at school!
what a long lie and five years' hypocrisy and flattery is their conduct
towards Dr. Birch! And the little boys' sisters? Are they any better,
and is it only after they come out in the world that the little darlings
learn a trick or two?

You may see, by the above letter of Mrs. Lambert, that she, like all
good women (and, indeed, almost all bad women), was a sentimental
person; and, as she looked at Harry Warrington laid in her best bed,
after the Colonel had bled him and clapped in his shoulder, as holding
by her husband's hand she beheld the lad in a sweet slumber, murmuring a
faint inarticulate word or two in his sleep, a faint blush quivering on
his cheek, she owned he was a pretty lad indeed, and confessed with
a sort of compunction that neither of her two boys--Jack who was
at Oxford, and Charles who was just gone back to school after the
Bartlemytide holidays--was half so handsome as the Virginian. What a
good figure the boy had! and when papa bled him, his arm was as white as
any lady's!

"Yes, as you say, Jack might have been as handsome but for the
small-pox: and as for Charley----" "Always took after his papa, my dear
Molly," said the Colonel, looking at his own honest face in a little
looking-glass with a cut border and a japanned frame, by which the chief
guests