hat you will be able to suggest to Mr. Mason
of Groby that the matter should be allowed to rest." And then Mr.
Furnival took his leave, still thinking how far it might be possible
that the enemy's side of the question might be supported by real
merits. Mr. Round was a good-natured old fellow, and if the case
could be inveigled out of his son's hands and into his own, it might
be possible that even real merits should avail nothing.

"I confess I am getting rather tired of it," said Felix Graham that
evening to his friend young Staveley, as he stood outside his bedroom
door at the top of a narrow flight of stairs in the back part of a
large hotel at Birmingham.

"Tired of it! I should think you are too."

"But nevertheless I am as sure as ever that good will come from it.
I am inclined to think that the same kind of thing must be endured
before any improvement is made in anything."

"That all reformers have to undergo Von Bauhr?"

"Yes, all of them that do any good. Von Bauhr's words were very dry,
no doubt."

"You don't mean to say that you understood them?"

"Not many of them. A few here and there, for the first half-hour,
came trembling home to my dull comprehension, and then--"

"You went to sleep."

"The sounds became too difficult for my ears; but dry and dull and
hard as they were, they will not absolutely fall to the ground. He
had a meaning in them, and that meaning will reproduce itself in some
shape."

"Heaven forbid that it should ever do so in my presence! All the
iniquities of which the English bar may be guilty cannot be so
intolerable to humanity as Von Bauhr."

"Well, good-night, old fellow; your governor is to give us his ideas
to-morrow, and perhaps he will be as bad to the Germans as your Von
Bauhr was to us."

"Then I can only say that my governor will be very cruel to the
Germans." And so they two went to their dreams.

In the mean time Von Bauhr was sitting alone looking back on the past
hours with ideas and views very different from those of the many
English lawyers who were at that time discussing his demerits. To him
the day had been one long triumph, for his voice had sounded sweet
in his own ears as, period after period, he had poured forth in full
flowing language the gathered wisdom and experience of his life.
Public men in England have so much to do that they cannot give time
to the preparation of speeches for such meetings as these, but Von
Bauhr had been at work on his pa