rode to; one, that for a mile's run you could have covered with
a blanket--heigh-ho! God's will be done;" and after that pious
adjuration, my father turned down his tumbler No. 3, to the bottom.
The memory of the lost harriers was always a painful recollection, and
brought its silent evidence that the fortunes of the Hamiltons were
not what they were a hundred years ago.

"With all my care," continued my mother, "and, as you know, I
economize to the best of my judgement, and after all is done that can
be done, our income barely will defray the outlay of our household."

"Or, as we used to say when I was dragooning thirty years ago, 'the
tongue will scarcely meet the buckle,'" responded the colonel.

"I have been thinking," said my mother timidly, "that Frank might go
to the bar."

"I would rather that he went direct to the devil," roared the
commander, who hated lawyers, and whose great toe had at the moment
undergone a disagreeable visitation.

"Do not lose temper, dear James," and she laid down her knitting to
replace the hassock he had kicked away under the painful irritation
of a disease that a stoic could not stand with patience, and, as they
would say in Ireland, would fully justify a Quaker if "he kicked his
mother."

"Curse the bar!" but he acknowledged his lady wife's kind offices by
tapping her gently on the cheek. "When I was a boy, Mary, a lawyer and
a gentleman were identified. Like the army--and, thank God! that is