id you put anything particular in it?"

"Why--it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior
blank--that would have been insulting. D----, at Vienna once, did me
an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should
remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the
identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not
to give him a clew. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just
copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words:

"'----
... Un dessein si funeste,
S'il n'est digne d'Atree, este digne de Thyeste.'

They are to be found in Crebillon's _Atree_."

RAB AND HIS FRIENDS

_Dr. John Brown_ (1810-1882)

Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary
Street from the High School, our heads together, and our arms
intertwisted as only lovers and boys know how or why.

When we got to the top of the street and turned north we espied a
crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog-fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and
so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before
we got up! And is not this boy-nature, and human nature, too? And
don't we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs
like fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best
of all reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see
the fight. They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or
man--courage, endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very
different from a love of making dogs fight, and aggravating and making
gain by their pluck. A boy--be he ever so fond himself of fighting, if
he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run
off with Bob and me fast enough; it is a natural, and a not wicked,
interest that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in
action.

Does any curious and finely ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye
at a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain? He did not--he could
not--see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid
induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd
masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman
fluttering wildly round the outside and using her tongue and her hands
freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular,
compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its
heads all bent downward and inward to one common focus.

Well,