expect him to be as nice upon a matter of fact
as a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less
than decent: you do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift
he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that
he cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a gingerbread
dragoon. It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, where
they figure so prettily--pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs.
They will come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to go into
offices and the witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious
parent! Let them doze among their playthings yet a little! for who knows
what a rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?

*****

'You are a friend of Archie Weir's?' said one to Frank Innes; and Innes
replied, with his usual flippancy and more than his usual insight: 'I
know Weir, but I never met Archie.' No one had met Archie, a malady most
incident to only sons. He flew his private signal, and none heeded it;
It seemed he was abroad in a world from which the very hope of intimacy
was banished; and he looked round about him on the concourse of his
fellow-students, and forward to the trivial days and acquaintances that
were to come, without hope or interest.

*****

'My poor, dear boy!' observed Glenalmond. 'My poor, dear and, if you
will allow me to say so, very foolish boy! You are only discovering
where you are; to one of your temperament, or of mine, a painful
discovery. The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred
millions of me, all different from each other and from us; there's no
royal road, we just have to sclamber and tumble.'

*****

Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services of no
single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with
a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour
themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court;
scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper
is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the
Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who
work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with
white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been
whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies the promise of some momentous
destiny? and that this Lukewarm bullet on which they play the