strangely foreign to my eyes, yet irresistibly familiar.

"Don't you remember Mr. Lenox?" asked Harry, staring at me. "Have you
forgotten the pleasures of your boyhood, miserable ingrate? Have you no
recollection of the big kite this benefactor of your youth made you,
which dragged you down the hill and threw you into the ditch?"

"I remember all about it," said I; and indeed I had been shaking hands
with my old friend all the time Harry was speaking.--"And I am delighted
to see you, Mr. Lenox."

I began looking about me for a chair. In fact, finding a chair was the
one trouble of our three lives, and was the only way in which we felt
hospitality to be a tax upon our time. For, although we had as many
chairs as the room would accommodate, they were always full of books,
fruit, cigars or hats and coats. There was one arm-chair, originally
covered with horsehair, which Harry called the "funeral coach:" it might
have been called anything, for it was so dingy, so battered, so broken,
that its _raison d'etre_ had come to be a matter of speculation. Into
this seat I now inducted our visitor. He was as shabby as the funeral
coach itself, but had kept up more gentility in his decay. I had not
seen him for four years, and the lack of any change in his appearance
surprised me. There he was, as well shaven, as threadbare, as jaunty
and well-mannered, as in the old days when we used to play the siege of
Troy, using an old packing-case for the wooden horse, and he was our
Trojan victim. I was much impressed by my own age, and said a good deal
in those days about the flight of time and the mutability of human
affairs: I expected anybody who was grown up when I was young to be well
stricken in years; and if Mr. Lenox had been a shrunken old man with
altered aspect and a deep sense of the worthlessness of all efforts
after temporalities, the change would have seemed only a reasonable one
to me.

But, on the contrary, he was just the same as ever, and began talking at
once about a grand coup he was going to make presently by investing in a
silver-mine. He had two thousand dollars, and would buy shares at
forty-nine, and be in time for the dividends of ten per cent. in July.
The stock was going up like a skyrocket: a week ago you could have
bought it for nineteen.

Jack had come in now, and was standing behind his future father-in-law's
chair. "A skyrocket is a bad simile," he remarked. "Everybody knows what
it comes down."

Mr.