re not."

"Ah, we might say that if he were making the advances."

"Well, perhaps you are right, Tom. What is your idea?"

"I haven't a very clear one. It seems to me I ought to get some
business friend of ours, whose judgment he would respect, to speak a
good word for me."

"Give you a character?"

"Yes. And of course I must go to Colonel Lapham. My notion would be to
inquire pretty thoroughly about him, and then, if I liked the look of
things, to go right down to Republic Street and let him see what he
could do with me, if anything."

"That sounds tremendously practical to me, Tom, though it may be just
the wrong way. When are you going down to Mount Desert?"

"To-morrow, I think, sir," said the young man. "I shall turn it over
in my mind while I'm off."

The father rose, showing something more than his son's height, with a
very slight stoop, which the son's figure had not. "Well," he said,
whimsically, "I admire your spirit, and I don't deny that it is
justified by necessity. It's a consolation to think that while I've
been spending and enjoying, I have been preparing the noblest future
for you--a future of industry and self-reliance. You never could draw,
but this scheme of going into the mineral-paint business shows that you
have inherited something of my feeling for colour."

The son laughed once more, and waiting till his father was well on his
way upstairs, turned out the gas and then hurried after him and
preceded him into his chamber. He glanced over it to see that
everything was there, to his father's hand. Then he said, "Good night,
sir," and the elder responded, "Good night, my son," and the son went
to his own room.

Over the mantel in the elder Corey's room hung a portrait which he had
painted of his own father, and now he stood a moment and looked at this
as if struck by something novel in it. The resemblance between his son
and the old India merchant, who had followed the trade from Salem to
Boston when the larger city drew it away from the smaller, must have
been what struck him. Grandfather and grandson had both the Roman nose
which appears to have flourished chiefly at the formative period of the
republic, and which occurs more rarely in the descendants of the
conscript fathers, though it still characterises the profiles of a good
many Boston ladies. Bromfield Corey had not inherited it, and he had
made his straight nose his defence when the old merchant accused him of
a want