u for that assurance,"--I said.

I went home completely contented and happy.

You may wonder, perhaps, at this buoyancy of temperament, that enabled
me to get over so quickly the disappointment and dejection I was
suffering from at Mrs Clyde's brusque rejection of my suit?

But, you must recollect that I was naturally sanguine, as I have
previously told you; and, the memory of my unhappy defeat, although not
quite forgotten, became merged into the hopeful anticipations I now
had--of working for my darling, and being enabled to renew my offer, in
a short time, with better chances of success.

Hang care! It killed a cat once, you know. Was it not Lord Palmerston,
by the way, who once made that capital classic hit at the versatile
chief of the Adullamites in Parliament during a debate on the budget,
when he said--"Atra cura post _equitem_ sedet?"

Care should not sit behind _me_, however; or, in front of me, either!

I wasn't going to be a martyr to it, I promise you.

I would soon see Min again; and, in the meantime, I could wait for her
and love her, in spite of all the stern mammas in creation, and
notwithstanding that my tongue might be tied for awhile.

As long as I knew that she loved me in return, whom or what had I to
fear?

I was, at all events, emperor of my own thoughts;--and, she was mine,
_there_!

CHAPTER FOUR.

"UP FOR EXAM."

Say, should the philosophic mind disdain
That good which makes each humbler bosom vain?
Let school-taught pride dissemble all it can,
These little things are great to little man!

In pursuance of the vicar's advice, I hied me without delay to the tutor
whom he had specially recommended; and, setting to work diligently,
crammed, as hard as I could, for my expected examination.

"Cramming," nothing more nor less, was, undoubtedly, the system pursued
by this modern instructor of maturity--I cannot say `of youth,' as the
majority of his pupils were men who had long cut their wisdom teeth, and
worn the virile toga almost threadbare:--stalwart men, "bearded like the
pard," in the fashion of Hamlet's warrior, which has now become so
general that heroes and civilians are indistinguishable the one from the
other.

The crammer dosed these with facts and figures at a five-hundred-horse-
power rate, interlarding them with such stray skeleton scraps of popular
information as mendicant scholars may pick up from the sumptuously-
spread tables of the learned, through