with my private chaplain.'

Mr. Peterborough's temporary absence had allowed me time for getting
ample funds placed at our disposal through the agency of my father's
solicitors, Messrs. Dettermain and Newson, whom I already knew from
certain transactions with them on his behalf. They were profoundly
courteous to me, and showed me his box, and alluded to his Case--a long
one, and a lamentable, I was taught to apprehend, by their lugubriously
professional tone about it. The question was naturally prompted in me,
'Why do you not go on with it?'

'Want of funds.'

'There's no necessity to name that now,' I insisted. But my father
desired them to postpone any further exposition of the case, saying,
'Pleasure first, business by-and-by. That, I take it, is in the order of
our great mother Nature, gentlemen. I will not have him help shoulder
his father's pack until he has had his, fill of entertainment.'

A smooth voyage brought us in view of the towers of Ostend at sunrise.
Standing with my father on deck, and gazing on this fringe of the grand
romantic Continent, I remembered our old travels, and felt myself bound
to him indissolubly, ashamed of my recent critical probings of his
character. My boy's love for him returned in full force. I was
sufficiently cognizant of his history to know that he kept his head
erect, lighted by the fire of his robust heart in the thick of
overhanging natal clouds. As the way is with men when they are too happy
to be sentimental, I chattered of anything but my feelings.

'What a capital idea that was of yours to bring down old Alphonse to