letter.'

How great was our ecstasy when after three years and a half we had
him at home again; handsome, vigorous, well-grown, excellently
reported of, fully justifying my mother's assurances that the sea
would make a man of him. There was Griffith in the fifth form and a
splendid cricketer, but Clarence could stand up to him now, and
Harrovian exploits were tame beside stories of sharks and negroes,
monkeys and alligators. There was one in particular, about a whole
boat's crew sitting down on what they thought was a fallen tree, but
which suddenly swept them all over on their faces, and turned out to
be a boa-constrictor, and would have embraced one of them if he had
not had the sail of the boat coiled round the mast, and palmed off
upon him, when he gorged it contentedly, and being found dead on the
next landing, his skin was used to cover the captain's sea-chest.
Clarence declined to repeat this tale and many others before the
elders, and was displeased with Emily for referring to it in public.
As to his terrors, he took it for granted that an officer of H.M.S.
Calypso, had left them behind, and in fact, he naturally forgot and
passed over what he had not been shielded from, while his hereditary
love of the sea really made those incidental to his profession much
more endurable than the bullying he had undergone at school.

We were very happy that Christmas, and very proud of our boys. One
evening we were treated to a box at the pantomime, and even I was
able to go to it. We put our young sailor and our sister in the
forefront, and believed that every one was as much struck with them
as with the wonderful transformations of Goody-Two-Shoes under the
wand of Harlequin. Brother-like, we might tease our one girl, and
call her an affected little pussy cat, but our private opinion was