physicked and drugged accordingly: and the best child for taking medicine ever seen. Indeed, medicine in some form soon became a necessity to him, and, later in life, the principal part of his mild pecuniary embarrassments had their origin in this necessity.

When he was very young, his mother died, and he never saw his father after this. Gradually he developed into a pale, good child, easily kept quiet, easily made to cry; very thoughtful apparently, but keeping his thoughts strictly to himself. Then he became a pale, leggy boy, a great favourite at school, working very hard, but getting no prizes except those for good conduct, which were always given to him without question or hesitation. Then there was a lanky youth who stayed at school late, until he became grandfather of the sixth, in a tail coat and stand-up collars.

Then he grew into the gentlest and best of freshmen to a somewhat fast college: who, although slow, religious, and of poor health and peaceful habits, gained a sort of half-respectful half-pitying affection from the strongest and the wildest more particularly after he had, mildly but quite firmly, before a whole common room, refused to give any information whatever con

cerning the ringleaders at a bonfire, which had been made under his window, and which he confessed to have witnessed. The men waited outside hall and cheered him that evening. Those wild young spirits, who had only a week before prised open his oak with a coal hammer at midnight, nailed him into his bed-room, broken his tea-things, and generally conducted themselves as our English youth do when anything abnormal, and consequently objectionable, comes in their way now made full amends by coming to him in a body, and telling him that it was they who had done it, but that they didn't know he was a brick; beyond which what could any gentleman desire in the way of satisfaction? He got on with them. Many will remember the way in which he, too gentle to denounce, would quietly and silently leave the company when the brilliancy of the conversation got a little too vivid for him, and men got fast and noisy. He was in the confidence of all in his second year. When the elder Bob got his year's rustication, it was up and down Algy Silcote's room that he walked, with scared pale face, consulting him as to how the terrible news was to be broken to the governor. When Bob's little brother, the idle, gentle little favourite

of the college, got plucked for his little-go, he bore up nobly before the other fellows, who wisely handed him over to Old Algy; and on Algy's sofa the poor boy lay down the moment they were alone together, and wept without reserve or hesitation. So he took his modest pass degree, and leaving, to the sorrow of every one, from the master to the messenger, was ordained one Trinity Sunday, having a small London curacy for title.

During the three happy years he had spent in concluding his education, he had had but few visitors. He was the only quiet man in St. Paul's, and quiet and mild men of other colleges were nervous about coming to tea with him in that den of howling and dangerous lunatics. The lodge alone, with its crowd of extravagantly-dressed men in battered caps and tattered gowns, who stared and talked loudly and openly of illegal escapades, who rowed in the University eight,-ay, and got first-classes in the schools, too, some of them, the terrible fellows-was too much for these heroes. They used to pass, quickly and shuddering, that beautiful old gateway, until the shouting of the encaged spirits became mellowed by distance: wondering what could

possibly have induced Silcote's "friends" to send him to such a college. But they always greedily listened to Algy's account of the terrible affairs which were carried on in that dreadful place. And indeed Algy was not sorry to recount them; for the conversation of the set to which his religious principles had driven him was often wearisomely dull, and sometimes very priggish and ill-conditioned. There were but four or five of them as earnest and good as himself, and the others palled on him so in time, with the prate of books they bought and never read, and of degrees they never took, that sometimes, in coming back late to that abode of mad fantastic vitality and good humour called St. Paul's College, he seemed to feel that he was going where he had never been-home; and was about to get a welcomemad enough, but sincere.

So Algy had no more than two out-college visitors all the time he was there, and they were wonderful favourites in the place. Algy's brothers were such great successes that the brightness which overspread his face on their arrival communicated itself to many others.

They were so utterly unlike him. The first a splendid young cornet of dragoons, up to anything, bound to

uphold the honour of the army by being so much faster than anybody else that it became necessary for the Vice Chancellor to communicate with the colonel of his regiment, to the intense delight and admiration of the Paul's men, and the deep horror of poor Algy. But, in spite of Tom's naughtiness, Tom was dearer to his halfbrother Algy than anything else in this world, and the boy dragoon, though he was fond of teasing and shocking Algy, was as fond of him as he could be of anything.

The other brother and visitor was very different person. A handsome, bright-eyed, eager youth from Eton, with an intense vivid curiosity and delight in everything, as if the world, which was just opening before him, was a great and beautiful intellectual problem, which unfolded and got more beautiful as each fresh piece of knowledge and each fresh piece of experience was gained: at one time in a state of breathless delight and admiration at hearing some man pass a splendid examination; then rapt in almost tearful awe at the anthem at Magdalen; then madly whooping on the tow-path. Such were some of the moods which expressed themselves in the noble open face of Arthur