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WITH the down for the first time shaved from his face, young Æneas stood in the draughty passage, turning his cocked hat in his hands till the nap had a cow's - lick on it. Chagrin it was that kept the tutor fidgeting outside the door of the study, where at that hour he ought by rights to have a couple of pupils on the march with him and Cæsar's sturdy lads through Gaul. It is one of the solemn days in life for a man when he starts to use a razor: now that the curly down was gone, and Æneas had seen in his glass a youth as boyish as he always shamefully felt himself to be, he rued the rash act that seemed to rob him in a moment

of his manhood. He had come for the evening lesson with his pupils, feeling somewhat like a man half-naked in a dream, but, like the usual dreamer in these circumstances, hopeful no one might observe his own confusion at the absence of a beard a small one at the best: he had come prepared at most for the bantering of Margaret Duncanson, eager to have it past, and now the skirmish was postponed! That was to make a double call upon his courage, and the supply he had flogged up for this rencounter was already vanished

gone from the field in a shameful rout, and the enemy not yet in sight.

Feeling that new-recovered

Copyright in the United States by Neil Munro.

VOL. CXCIV.-NO. MCLXXIII.

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