g. One of his
pictures, "Balbus was assisting his mother-in-law to convince the
dragon," is irresistibly comic. A short quotation will better enable
the reader to understand the point of the joke:--

Balbus was waiting for them at the hotel; the journey down
had tried him, he said; so his two pupils had been the round
of the place, in search of lodgings, without the old tutor
who had been their inseparable companion from their
childhood. They had named him after the hero of their Latin
exercise-book, which overflowed with anecdotes about that
versatile genius--anecdotes whose vagueness in detail was
more than compensated by their sensational brilliance.
"Balbus has overcome all his enemies" had been marked by
their tutor, in the margin of the book, "Successful
Bravery." In this way he had tried to extract a moral from
every anecdote about Balbus--sometimes one of warning, as in
"Balbus had borrowed a healthy dragon," against which he had
written, "Rashness in Speculation "--sometimes of
encouragement, as in the words, "Influence of Sympathy in
United Action," which stood opposite to the anecdote "Balbus
was assisting his mother-in-law to convince the dragon"--and
sometimes it dwindled down to a single word, such as
"Prudence," which was all he could extract from the touching
record that "Balbus, having scorched the tail of the dragon,
went away." His pupils liked the short morals best, as it
left them more room for marginal illustrations, and in this
instance they required all the space they could get to
exhibit the rapidity of the hero's departure.

Balbus and his pupils go in search of lodgings, which are only to be
found in a certain square; at No. 52, one of the pupils supplements
the usual questions by asking the landlady if the cat scratches:--

The landlady looked round suspiciously, as if to make sure
the cat was not listening. "I will not deceive you,
gentlemen," she said. "It _do_ scratch, but not without
you pulls its whiskers! It'll never do it," she repeated
slowly, with a visible effort to recall the exact words of
some written agreement between herself and the cat, "without
you pulls its whiskers!"

"Much may be excused in a cat so treated," said Balbus as
they left the house and crossed to No. 70, leaving the
landlady curtesying on the doorstep, and still murmurin