ince they started on this entangled errand of theirs,--and gave him his
ride. "I was thinking of you at the moment," said Coram,--"thinking of
old college times, of the mystery of language as unfolded by the Abbe
Faria to Edmond Dantes in the depths of the Chateau d'If. I was
wondering if you could teach me Japanese, if I asked you to a Christmas
dinner." I laughed. Japan was really a novelty then, and I asked him
since when he had been in correspondence with the sealed country. It
seemed that their house at Shanghae had just sent across there their
agents for establishing the first house in Edomo, in Japan, under the
new treaty. Everything looked promising, and the beginnings were made
for the branch which has since become Dot and Trevilyan there. Of this
he had the first tidings in his letters by the mail of that afternoon.
John Coram, his brother, had written to him, and had said that he
enclosed for his amusement the Japanese bill of particulars, as it had
been drawn out, on which they had founded their orders for the first
assorted cargo ever to be sent from America to Edomo. Bill of
particulars there was, stretching down the long tissue-paper in
exquisite chirography. But by some freak of the "total depravity of
things," the translated order for the assorted cargo was not there. John
Coram, in his care to fold up the Japanese writing nicely, had left on
his own desk at Shanghae the more intelligible English. "And so I must
wait," said Tom philosophically, "till the next East India mail for my
orders, certain that seven English houses have had less enthusiastic and
philological correspondents than my brother."

I said I did not see that. That I could not teach him to speak the
Taghalian dialects so well, that he could read them with facility before
Saturday. But I could do a good deal better. Did he remember writing a
note to old Jack Percival for me five years ago? No, he remembered no
such thing; he knew Jack Percival, but never wrote a note to him in his
life. Did he remember giving me fifty dollars, because I had taken a
delicate boy, whom I was going to send to sea, and I was not quite
satisfied with the government outfit? No, he did not remember that,
which was not strange, for that was a thing he was doing every day.
"Well, I don't care how much you remember, but the boy about whom you
wrote to Jack Percival, for whose mother's ease of mind you provided the
half-hundred, is back again,--strong, straight, and