, uncle!" cried the boy; "don't, don't, please; that doesn't
seem like you. It's like being at the rectory. Don't you begin to
lecture me."

"Oh, very well, Ned. I've done."

"That's right; and remember you said example was better than precept."

"And so it is, Ned."

"Very well then, uncle!" cried the boy; "I want to follow your example
and go abroad."

Johnstone Murray brought his fist down bang upon the table of his
study--the table covered with books, minerals, bird-skins, fossils,
bones, and the miscellaneous odds and ends which a naturalist delights
in collecting round him in his half study, half museum, where as in this
case, everything was so sacred that the housemaid dared hardly enter the
place, and the result was a cloud of dust which immediately made Ned
sneeze violently. Then his uncle sneezed; then Ned sneezed; then they
both sneezed together, and again and again.

"Oh, I say, uncle!" cried Ned; and he sneezed once more.

"Er tchishou! Bless the king!--queen I mean," said the naturalist.

"You shouldn't, uncle," cried the boy, now laughing immoderately, as his
uncle sneezed and choked, and wiped his eyes.

"It was all your fault, you young nuisance. Dear me, this dust--"

"Ought to be saved for snuff."

"Now, look here, Ned," said Mr Murray at last. "I do not say that some
day when you have grown up to be a man, I may not ask you to accompany
me on an expedition into some new untried country, such as the part of
the Malay Peninsula I am off to visit next."

"How long will it be before you consider I am a man, uncle?"

"Let's see; how old are you now?"

"Sixteen turned, uncle."

"Humph! Well, suppose we say at one and twenty."

"Five years!" cried the boy in despair. "Why, by that time there will
not be a place that you have not searched. There will be nothing left
to discover, and--" (a sneeze), "there's that dust again."

"You miserable young ignoramus! what are you talking about?" cried the
naturalist. "Why, if a man could live to be a hundred, and have a
hundred lives, he would not achieve to a hundredth part of what there is
to be discovered in this grand--this glorious world."

He stood up with one hand resting on the table, and began to gesticulate
with the other.

"Why, my dear boy, before I was your age I had begun to take an active
interest in natural history, and for considerably over twenty years now
I have been hard at work, with my eyes gradually opening to th