honour on their side, they told him; and every man rose,
with his pot in one hand and his pipe in the other, yet able to stand,
and to thump with his heels, being careful. Then the President made
entry in a book, and bowed, and Dan was requested to sign it. In the
fervour of good-will, and fine feeling, and the pride of popularity, the
young man was not old enough to resist, but set his name down firmly.
Then all shook hands with him, and the meeting was declared to be
festive, in honour of a new and noble member.

It is altogether wrong to say--though many people said it--that young
Dan Tugwell was even a quarter of a sheet in the wind, when he steered
his way home. His head was as solid as that of his father; which,
instead of growing light, increased in specific, generic, and
differential gravity, under circumstances which tend otherwise, with an
age like ours, that insists upon sobriety, without allowing practice.
All Springhaven folk had long practice in the art of keeping sober, and
if ever a man walked with his legs outside his influence, it was always
from defect of proper average quite lately.

Be that as it may, the young man came home with an enlarged map of the
future in his mind, a brisk and elastic rise in his walk, and his head
much encouraged to go on with liberal and indescribable feelings. In
accordance with these, he expected his mother to be ready to embrace
him at the door, while a saucepan simmered on the good-night of the
wood-ash, with just as much gentle breath of onion from the cover as a
youth may taste dreamily from the lips of love. But oh, instead of this,
he met his father, spread out and yet solid across the doorway, with
very large arms bare and lumpy in the gleam of a fireplace uncrowned by
any pot. Dan's large ideas vanished, like a blaze without a bottom.

"Rather late, Daniel," said the captain of Springhaven, with a nod of
his great head, made gigantic on the ceiling. "All the rest are abed,
the proper place for honest folk. I suppose you've been airning money,
overtime?"

"Not I," said Dan; "I work hard enough all day. I just looked in at the
Club, and had a little talk of politics."

"The Club, indeed! The stinking barrow-grinders! Did I tell you, or did
I forget to tell you, never to go there no more?"

"You told me fast enough, father; no doubt about that. But I am not
aboard your boat, when I happen on dry land, and I am old enough now to
have opinions of my own."

"Oh,