time I shall have brought myself down to, let us say, seven stone weight, I
shall have reached the goal.'

This speech he delivered slowly and calmly, as though enunciating a very
grave proposition.

'What new nonsense is this? Don't you think health worth something?'

'Next to life, unquestionably; but one condition of health is to be alive,
and I don't see how to manage that. Look here, Dick, I have just had a
quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher,
but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a niggard to him
in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in
the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There
are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow me one
hundred and fifty out of it. That's the way they neglect arithmetic in our
modern schools!'

'Has he reduced your allowance?'

'He has done more, he has extinguished it.'

'Have you provoked him to this?'

'I have provoked him to it.'

'But is it not possible to accommodate matters? It should not be very
difficult, surely, to show him that once you are launched in life--'

'And when will that be, Dick?' broke in the other. 'I have been on the