d I'll take over that mortgage."

The General's lower lip shot out with a sulky and forbidding expression.

"The best thing that could happen to the old fool would be to have his
house sold above him, and by Jove, if he doesn't cease his extravagance,
I'll stand off and let them do it as sure as my name is George
Bolingbroke. What Theophilus needs," he concluded angrily, "is
discipline."

"It's too late to begin to discipline a man of over eighty."

"No, it ain't," retorted the General; "it's never too late. If it
doesn't do him any good in this world, it will be sure to benefit him in
the next. He's entirely too opinionated, that's the trouble with him. Do
you remember the way he sat up over there on Church Hill, and tried to
beat me down that Robert Carrington lived in Bushrod's house, and that
he'd attended him there in his last illness? As if I didn't know Bushrod
Carrington as well as my own brother. Got all his clothes in Paris. Can
see him now as he used to come to church in one of his waistcoats of
peaehblow brocade. Yet you heard Theophilus stick out against me.
Wouldn't give in even when I offered to take him straight to Bushrod's
grave in Saint John's Churchyard, where I had helped to lay him. That's
at the back of the whole thing, I tell you. If Theophilus had had a
little discipline, this would never have happened."

"All the same I hope you won't let it come to a sale," I responded, as a
bunch of telegrams was brought to him, and we settled down to our
morning's work.

In the afternoon when I went back to the doctor's, I found Sally in the
low canvas chair between the giant-of-battle rose-bush and the bleeding
hearts, with George Bolingbroke on the ground at her feet, reading to
her, I noticed at a glance, out of a book of poems. George hated
poetry--I had never forgotten his contemptuous boyish attitude toward
Latin--and the sight of him stretched there, his handsome figure at full
length, his impassive face flushed with a fine colour, produced in me a
curious irritation, which sounded in my voice when I spoke.

"I thought you scorned literature, George. Are you acting the part of a
gay deceiver?"

"Oh, it goes well on a day like this," he rejoined in his amiable
drawling manner; "the doctor has been quoting his favourite verse of
Horace to us. He has had trouble with his hybridising or something, so
he tells us--what is it, doctor? I'm no good at Latin."

Dr. Theophilus, who was planting oyster