"Ah! uncle. But what would they say? Do you think I should not like to
be a soldier? Don't tempt me!"

My uncle had recourse to his snuff-box; and at that moment--
unfortunately, perhaps, for the laurels that might otherwise have
wreathed the brows of Pisistratus of England--private conversation was
stopped by the sudden and noisy entrance of Uncle Jack. No apparition
could have been more unexpected.

"Here I am, my dear friends. How d'ye do; how are you all? Captain de
Caxton, yours heartily. Yes, I am released, thank Heaven! I have given
up the drudgery of that pitiful provincial paper. I was not made for
it. An ocean in a tea cup! I was indeed! Little, sordid, narrow
interests; and I, whose heart embraces all humanity,--you might as well
turn a circle into an isolated triangle."

"Isosceles!" said my father, sighing as he pushed aside his notes, and
very slowly becoming aware of the eloquence that destroyed all chance of
further progress that night in the Great Book. "'Isosceles' triangle,
Jack Tibbets, not 'isolated."'

"'Isosceles' or 'isolated,' it is all one," said Uncle Jack, as he
rapidly performed three evolutions, by no means consistent with his
favorite theory of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number,"--
first, he emptied into the cup which he took from my mother's hands half
the thrifty contents of a London cream-jug; secondly, he reduced the
circle of a muffin, by the abstraction of three triangles, to as nearly
an isosceles as possible; and thirdly, striding towards the fire,
lighted in consideration of Captain de Caxton, and hooking his coat-