l a night's sleep and
the light of a new day had brought them in a manner to themselves that
anything less fragmentary could be entered upon. At breakfast all
parties seemed to have settled down into a sober consciousness of
satisfied desire. Then Mr. Dallas asked his son how he liked Oxford?

Pitt exhausted himself in giving both the how and the why. Yet no
longer like a boy.

'Think you'll end by settling in England, eh?' said his father, with
seeming carelessness.

'I have not thought of it, sir.'

'What's made old Strahan take such a fancy to you? Seems to be a
regular love affair.'

'He is a good friend to me,' Pitt answered seriously. 'He has shown it
in many ways.'

'He'll put you in his will, I expect.'

'I think he will do nothing of the kind. He knows I will have enough.'

'Nobody knows it,' said the older Dallas drily. 'I might lose all _my_
money, for anything you can tell.'

The younger man's eyes flashed with a noble sparkle in them. 'What I
say is still true, sir. What is the use of Oxford?'

'Humph!' said his father. 'The use of Oxford is to teach young men of
fortune to spend their money elegantly.'

'Or to enable young men who have no fortune to do elegantly without it.'

'There is no doing elegantly without money, and plenty of it,' said the
elder man, looking from under lowered eyelids, in a peculiar way he
had, at his son. 'Plenty of it, I tell you. You cannot have too much.'

'Money is a good dog.'

'A good _what?_'

'A good servant, sir, I should say. You may see a case occasionally
where it has got to be the master.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'A man unable to be anything and spoiled for doing anything worth
while, because he has so much of it; a man whose property is so large
that he has come to look upon money as the first thing.'

'It is the first thing and the last thing, I can tell you. Without it,
a man has to play second fiddle to somebody else all his life.'

'Do you think there is no independence but that of the purse, sir?'

'Beggarly little use in any other kind. In fact, there is not any other
kind, Pitt. What passes for it is just fancy, and struggling to make
believe. The really independent man is the man who need not ask anybody
else's leave to do anything.'

Pitt let the question drop, and went on with his breakfast, for which
he seemed to have a good appetite.

'Your muffins are as good as ever, mother,' he remarked.

Mrs. Dallas, to judge by her