, James?" says the Colonel, lighting a cheroot
as he sits on the table. Was it joy, or the bedroom candle with which
he lighted his cigar, which illuminated his honest features so, and made
them so to shine?

"I have been occupied, sir, in taking the lad's moral measurement: and
have pumped him as successfully as ever I cross-examined a rogue in
my court. I place his qualities thus:--Love of approbation sixteen.
Benevolence fourteen. Combativeness fourteen. Adhesiveness two.
Amativeness is not yet of course fully developed, but I expect will be
prodeegiously strong. The imaginative and reflective organs are very
large--those, of calculation weak. He may make a poet or a painter, or
you may make a sojer of him, though worse men than him's good enough for
that--but a bad merchant, a lazy lawyer, and a miserable mathematician.
He has wit and conscientiousness, so ye mustn't think of making a
clergyman of him."

"Binnie!" says the Colonel gravely, "you are always sneering at the
cloth."

"When I think that, but for my appointment to India, I should have been
a luminary of the faith and a pillar of the church! grappling with the
ghostly enemy in the pulpit, and giving out the psawm. Eh, sir, what
a loss Scottish Divinity has had in James Binnie!" cries the little
civilian with his most comical face. "But that is not the question.
My opinion, Colonel, is, that young Scapegrace will give you a deal of
trouble; or would, only you are so absurdly proud of him that you think
everything he does is perfaction. He'll spend your money for you: he'll
do as little work as need be. He'll get into scrapes with the sax. He's
almost as simple as his father, and that is to say that any rogue
will cheat him; and he seems to me to have got your obstinate habit
of telling the truth, Colonel, which may prevet his getting on in the
world, but on the other hand will keep him from going very wrong. So
that, though there is every fear for him, there's some hope and some
consolation."

"What do you think of his Latin and Greek?" asks the Colonel. Before
going out to his party, Newcome had laid a deep scheme with Binnie, and
it had been agreed that the latter should examine the young fellow in
his humanities.

"Wall," cries the Scot, "I find that the lad knows as much about Greek
and Latin as I knew myself when I was eighteen years of age."

"My dear Binnie, is it possible? You, the best scholar in all India!"

"And which amounted to exactly