penitent, and promised he'd never be unpunctual again if he lived to
be a hundred. Then Aunt Charlotte was mollified, and regaled him with
an improving account of a most excellent book she had just been
reading, upon the importance of instilling sound principles of
political economy into the mind of the agricultural labourer. It was
so essential, she explained, that people in that position should
understand something about the laws which govern prices, the relations
of capital and labour, the _metayer_ system, and the ratio which
should exist between an increase of population and the exhaustion of
the soil by too frequent crops of wheat; and she wound up by
propounding a series of hypothetical problems based on the doctrines
she had set forth, for Austin to solve offhand.

Austin listened very dutifully for some time, but the subject bored
him atrociously, and his attention began to wander. At last he made
some rather vague and irrelevant replies, and then announced boldly
that he thought all politicians were very silly old gentlemen,
particularly economists; for his own part, he hated economy,
especially when he wanted to buy something beautiful to look at; he
further considered that political economists would be much better
employed if they sat contemplating tulips instead of writing horrid
books, and that Lubin was a great deal wiser than the whole pack of
them put together. Then Aunt Charlotte got extremely angry, and a
great wrangle ensued, in the course of which she said he was a
foolish, ignorant boy, who talked nonsense for the sake of talking it.
Austin replied by asking if she knew what a quincunx was, or what
Virgil was really driving at when he composed the First Eclogue, and
whether she had ever heard of Lycidas; and when she said that she had
something better to do than stuff her head with quidnunxes and all
such pagan rubbish, he remarked very politely that ignorance was