ol had asked you what politics
was, you would have sucked your thumb, and offered them to suck it; for
generous you always was, and just came after. And what cry have bigger
folk, grown upright and wicked, to make about being smacked, when they
deserve it, for meddling with matters outside of their business, by
those in authority over them?"

"Well, mother, I daresay you are right, though I don't altogether see
the lines of it. But one thing I will promise you--whatever father does
to me, I will not lift a hand against him. But I must be off. I am late
already."

"Where to, Dan? Where to? I always used to know, even if you was going
courting. Go a-courting, Dan, as much as ever you like, only don't make
no promises. But whatever you do, keep away from that bad, wicked, Free
and Frisky Club, my dear."

"Mother, that's the very place I am just bound to. After all you have
said, I would have stayed away to-night, except for being on the list,
and pledged in honour to twenty-eight questions, all bearing upon the
grand issues of the age."

"I don't know no more than the dead, what that means, Dan. But I know
what your father has got in his pocket for you. And he said the next
time you went there, you should have it."

CHAPTER XXX

PATERNAL DISCIPLINE

"The Fair, Free, and Frisky"--as they called themselves, were not of
a violent order at all, neither treasonable, nor even disloyal. Their
Club, if it deserved the name, had not been of political, social, or
even convivial intention, but had lapsed unawares into all three uses,
and most of all that last mentioned. The harder the times are, the more
confidential (and therefore convivial) do Englishmen become; and if
Free-trade survives with us for another decade, it will be the death of
total abstinence. But now they had bad times, without Free-trade--that
Goddess being still in the goose-egg--and when two friends met, without
a river between them, they were bound to drink one another's health, and
did it, without the unstable and cold-blooded element. The sense of this
duty was paramount among the "Free and Frisky," and without it their
final cause would have vanished long ago, and therewith their formal
one.

None of the old-established folk of the blue blood of Springhaven,
such as the Tugwells, the Shankses, the Praters, the Bowleses, the
Stickfasts, the Blocks, or the Kedgers, would have anything to do
with this Association, which had formed itself among th