manage to do so, he visited his friend in the shed, which they named
Pegaway Hall. There he sometimes assisted Phil, but more frequently
held him in conversation, and commented in a free and easy way on his
work,--for his admiration of Phil was not sufficient to restrain his
innate insolence.

One evening Phil Maylands was seated at his table, busy with the works
of an old watch. Little Pax sat on the table swinging his legs. He had
brought a pipe with him, and would have smoked, but Phil sternly forbade
it.

"It's bad enough for men to fumigate their mouths," he said, with a
smile on his lip and a frown in his eye, "but when I see a thing like
you trying to make yourself look manly by smoking, I can't help thinking
of a monkey putting on the boots and helmet of a Guardsman. The boots
and helmet look grand, no doubt, but that makes the monkey seem all the
more ridiculous. Your pipe suggests manhood, Pax, but you look much
more like a monkey than a man when it's in your mouth."

"How severe you are to-night, Phil!" returned Pax, putting the pipe,
however, in his pocket; "where did you graduate, now--at Cambridge or
Oxford? Because w'en my eldest boy is big enough I'd like to send 'im
w'ere he'd acquire sitch an amazin' flow of eloquence."

Phil continued to rub the works of the watch, but made no reply.

"I say, Phil," observed the little fellow, after a thoughtful pause.

"Well?"

"Don't it strike you, sometimes, that this is a queer sort of world?"

"Yes, I've often thought that, and it has struck me, too, that you are
one of the queerest fish in it."

"Come, Phil, don't be cheeky. I'm in a sedate frame of mind to-night,
an' want to have a talk in a philosophical sort o' way of things in
general."

"Well, Pax, go ahead. I happen to have been reading a good deal about
things in general of late, so perhaps between us we may grind something
out of a talk."

"Just so; them's my ideas precisely. There's nothin'," said Pax,
thrusting both hands deeper into his trousers pockets, and swinging his
legs more vigorously--"nothin' like a free an' easy chat for developin'
the mental powers. But I say, what a fellow you are for goin' ahead!
Seems to me that you're always either workin' at queer contrivances or
readin'."

"You forget, Pax, that I sometimes carry telegraphic messages."

"Ha! true, then you and I are bound together by the cords of a common
dooty--p'r'aps I should say an uncommon dooty, all thi