ally close, in order to hide the natural wave of which, I
discovered later, he was ashamed. He had pleasant brown eyes, and a
merry smile, which lent a singular charm to his face when it hovered
about his mouth.

"I say, doctor, I wish you'd let me off to-night. I'll do double
to-morrow," he begged, and then turned to me with his pleasant, intimate
manner: "Don't you hate Latin? I do. Before Dr. Theophilus began
coaching me I went to a woman, and that was worse--she made it so silly.
I hate women, don't you?"

"Young George," observed Dr. Theophilus, with sternness, "for every
disrespectful allusion to the ladies, I shall give you an extra page of
grammar."

"I'm no worse than uncle, doctor. Uncle says--"

"I forbid you to repeat any flippant remarks of General Bolingbroke's,
George, and you may tell him so, with my compliments, at breakfast."

Opening his book, he glanced at me gravely over its pages, and the next
instant my education in the ancient languages and the finer graces of
society commenced.

On that first evening I won a place in the doctor's affections, which, I
like to think, I never really lost in the many changes the future
brought me. My obsequious respect for dead tongues redeemed, to a great
measure, the appalling ignorance I immediately displayed of the merest
rudiments of geography and history; and when the time came, I believe it
even reconciled him to my bodily stature, which always appeared to him
to be too large to conform to the smaller requirements of society. In my
fourteenth year I began to grow rapidly, and his chief complaint of me
after this was that I never learned to manage my hands and feet as if
they really belonged to me--a failing that I am perfectly aware I was
never able entirely to overcome. It would doubtless take the breeding of
all the Bolingbrokes, he once informed me, with a sigh, to enable a man
to carry a stature such as mine with the careless dignity which might
possibly have been attained by a moderate birth and a smaller body.

"Nature has intended you for a prize-fighter, but God has made of you a
gentleman," he added, with his fine, characteristic philosophy, which
escaped me at the moment; "it is a blessing, I suppose, to be endowed
with a healthy body, but if I were you, I should endeavour to keep my
members constantly in my mind. It is the next best thing to behaving as
if they did not exist."

This was said so regretfully that I hadn't the heart to inform