hor anywhere you like.
I'm smoking. Suppose you smoke too.--Hoi! Bring up a clean pipe," cried
this rough diamond, in conclusion, turning up a loose corner of the
carpet, and roaring through a crack in the floor into the shop below.

The pipe was brought. Zack sat down on the buffalo hide, and began to
ask his queer friend about the life he had been leading in the wilds of
North and South America. From short replies at first, Mat was gradually
beguiled into really relating some of his adventures. Wild,
barbarous fragments of narrative they were; mingling together in one
darkly-fantastic record, fierce triumphs and deadly dangers; miseries
of cold, and hunger, and thirst; glories of hunters' feasts in mighty
forests; gold-findings among desolate rocks; gallopings for life from
the flames of the blazing prairie; combats with wild beasts and with
men wilder still; weeks of awful solitude in primeval wastes; days and
nights of perilous orgies among drunken savages; visions of meteors in
heaven, of hurricanes on earth, and of icebergs blinding bright, when
the sunshine was beautiful over the Polar seas.

Young Thorpe listened in a fever of excitement. Here was the desperate,
dangerous, roving life of which he had dreamed! He longed already to
engage in it: he could have listened to descriptions of it all day long.
But Mat was the last man in the world to err, at any time, on the side
of diffuseness in relating the results of his own experience. And he now
provokingly stopped, on a sudden, in the middle of an adventure among
the wild horses on the Pampas; declaring that he was tired of feeling
his own tongue wag, and had got so sick of talking of himself, that he
was determined not to open his mouth again--except to put a rump-steak
and a pipe in it--for the rest of the day.

Finding it impossible to make him alter this resolution, Zack thought of
his engagement with Mr. Blyth, and asked what time it was. Mat, having
no watch, conveyed this inquiry into the shop by the same process of
roaring through the crack in the ceiling which he had already employed
to produce a clean pipe. The answer showed Zack that he had barely time
enough left to be punctual to his appointment in the Laburnum Road.

"I must be off to my friend at the turnpike," he said, rising and
putting on his hat; "but I shall be back again in an hour or two. I say,
have you thought seriously yet about going back to America?" His eyes
sparkled eagerly as he pu