&c., or whether he found himself unable to correct his own "Redundancy
of Humours," certain it is that, at the very Pinnacle of Promise,
and Height of Achievement, GRANDOLPH broke his indentures of
Apprenticeship, and _ran away!_

And now, indeed, came the Opportunity of the true Industrious
Apprentice, the hitherto calm and languid-looking, but, in verity,
valorous, and vigilant, and virile ARTHTUR. Whereof, to be sure,
he made abundant use, burgeoning forth into full blossom with
astonishing suddenness, seizing Opportunity by the forelock with manly
promptitude, and gaining golden opinions from all sorts of people;
so that, after brief probation, he slipped, by general acclaim, into
that very premier place so strangely, suddenly, and intempestively
abdicated by the Idle Apprentice, GRANDOLPH.

Concerning the latter, the latest reports are not reassuring. Like his
celebrated prototype of fable, the ill-fated "Don't Care," he runneth
a chance of being "devoured by lions"! At least he appears to have
sought the company of those parlous beasts in their _native Afric
wilds_. We hear that "the lions kept him tucked up one night," which
same news (--gathered from a diurnal intituled the Johannesberg
_Star_--) hath a fearsome and ill-boding sound. That he is--for the
time at least--in every sense "tucked up," is only too obviously
true. Peradventure he may yet think the better of it, correct his
Frothy Distemper and Vagrant Disposition, and (as the agonising
advertisements have it) return to his friends that all may be forgiven
and much forgotten!

But the last accounts of him picture him as lying languidly asprawl
upon a Mausoleum in Mashonaland, _playing dice with himself!_ The tomb