hasn't jaw,' that's what I
said. And besides, he deliberately trod on my toe the first time I ever
met him. Didn't know it was gouty, eh? What right has he got, I asked,
to suppose that any gentleman's toe isn't gouty?"

His lower lip protruded angrily, and he sat staring into his glass of
water with an enquiring and sulky look. It is no small tribute to my
capacity for hero-worship to say that it survived even this nearer
approach to the gouty presence of my divinity. But the glamour of
success--the only glamour that shines without borrowed light in the
hard, dry atmosphere of the workaday world--still hung around him; and
his very dissipations--yes, even his fleshly frailties--reflected, for
the moment at least, a romantic interest. I began to wonder if certain
moral weaknesses were, indeed, the inevitable attributes of the great
man, and there shot into my mind, with a youthful folly of regret, the
memory of a drink I had declined that morning, and of a pretty maiden at
the Old Market whom I might have kissed and did not. Was the doctor's
teaching wrong, after all, and had his virtues made him a failure in
life, while the General's vices had but helped him to his success? I was
very young, and I had not yet reached the age when I could perceive the
expediency of the path of virtue unless in the end it bordered on
pleasant places. "The General is a bigger man than the doctor," I
thought, half angrily, "and yet the General will be a gay old bird as
long as the gout permits him to hobble." And it seemed to me suddenly
that the moral order, on which the doctor loved to dilate, had gone
topsy-turvy while I stood on the General's porch. As if reading my
thoughts the great man looked up at me, with his roguish twinkle.

"Now there's Theophilus!" he observed. "Whatever you are, sir, don't be
a damned mollycoddle."

Young George, plucking persistently at my sleeve, drew me at last out of
the presence and into the house, where I smelt the fragrance of
strawberries, freshly gathered.

"Here're the books," said George, leading me to the door of a long room,
filled with rosewood bookcases and family portraits of departed
Bolingbrokes. Then as I was about to cross the threshold, the sound of a
bright voice speaking to the General on the porch caused me to stop
short, and stand holding my breath in the hall.

"Good afternoon, General! You look as if you needed exercise."

"Exercise, indeed! Do you take me for your age, you mi