more solve the next one than the rule of three will solve a question in calculus—or, to rise into your sphere, than the receipt for one-two-three-four cake conduct you to a successful issue through plum pudding—"

I excel in metaphysical discussions, and was about giving further elaboration of my favorite idea when the door burst open. Master Billy came tumbling in with a torn jacket, a bloody nose, the trace of a few tears in his eyes, and the mangiest of cur dogs in his hands.

"Oh my! my!! my!!!" exclaimed his mother.

"Don't you get scared, ma!" cried Billy, smiling a stern smile of triumph; "I smashed the nose off him! He won't sass me again for nothing this while! Uncle Teddy, d'ye know it wasn't a dogfight after all? There was that nasty good-for-nothing Joe Casey 'n' Patsy Grogan and a lot of bad boys from Mackerelville; and they'd caught this poor little ki-oodle and tied a tin pot to his tail and were trying to set Joe's dog on him, though he's ten times littler—"

"You naughty, naughty boy! How did you suppose your mother'd feel to see you playing with those ragamuffins?"

"Yes, I played 'em! I polished 'em—that's the play I did! Says I, 'Put down that poor little pup! Ain't you ashamed of yourself, Patsy Grogan?' 'I guess you don't know who I am,' says he. That's the way they always say, Uncle Teddy, to make a fellow think they're some awful great fighters. So says I again, 'Well, you put down that dog or I'll show you who I am'; and when he held on, I let him have it. Then he dropped the pup, and as I stooped to pick it up he gave me one on the bugle."

"Bugle! Oh! oh! oh!"

"The rest pitched in to help him; but I grabbed the pup, and while I was trying to give as good as I got—only a fellow can't do it well with only one hand, Uncle Teddy—up came a policeman and the whole crowd ran away. So I got the dog safe, and here he is!"

With that Billy set down his "ki-oodle," bade farewell to every fear, and wiped his bleeding nose. The unhappy beast slunk back between the legs of his preserver and followed him out of the room, as Lu, with an expression of maternal despair, bore him away for the correction of his dilapidated raiment and depraved associations. I felt such sincere pride in this young Mazzini of the dog-nation that I was vexed at Lu for bestowing on him reproof instead of congratulation; but she was not the only conservative who fails to see a good cause and a heroic heart under a bloody nose and torn jacket. I resolved that if Billy was punished, he should have his recompense before long in an extra holiday at Barnum's or the Hippotheatron.

You already have some idea of my other nephew if you have noticed that none of us, not even that habitual disrespecter of dignities, Billy, ever called him Dan. It would have seemed as incongruous as to call Billy William.

He was one of those youths who never give their parents a moment's uneasiness; who never have to have their wills broken, and never forget to put on their rubbers or take an umbrella. In boyhood he was intended for a missionary. Had it been possible for him to go to Greenland's icy mountains without catching cold, or to India's coral strand without getting bilious, his parents would have carried out their pleasing dream of contributing him to the world's evangelization. Lu and Mr. Lovegrove had no doubt that he would have been greatly blessed if he could have stood it. They brought him up in the most careful manner, and I can not recollect the time when he was not president, secretary, or something in some society of small yet good children. He was not only an exemplar to whom all Lu's friends pointed their own nursery as the little boy who could say most hymns and sit stillest in church, but he was a reproof even unto his elders. One Sunday afternoon, in the Connecticut village where my brother-in-law used to spend his summers, when half of the congregation was slumbering under the combined effect of the heat, a lunch of cheese and apples, and the sermon, my nephew, then aged five, sat bolt upright in the pew, winkless as a demon hearing a new candidate suspected of shakiness on a "a card'nal p'int," and mortified almost to death poor old Mrs. Pringle, who, compassionating his years, had handed him a sprig of her "meetin'-seed" over the back of the seat, by saying, in a loud and stern voice: "I don't eat things in church."

I should have spanked the boy when I got home, but Lu, with tears in her eyes, quoted something about the mouths of babes and sucklings.

Both she and his father always encouraged old manners in him. I think they took such pride in raising a peculiarly pale boy as a gardener does in getting a nice blanch on his celery, and, so long as he was not absolutely sick, the graver he was, the better. He was a sensitive plant, a violet by a mossy stone, and all that sort of thing. But when in his tenth year he had the measles, and was narrowly carried through, Lu got a scare about him. During his convalescence, reading aloud a life of Henry Martyn to amuse him, she found in it a picture of that young apostle preaching to a crowd of Hindus without any boots on. An American mother's association of such behavior with croup and ipecac was too strong to be counteracted by known climatic facts; and from that hour, as she never had before, Lu realized that being a missionary might involve going to carry the gospel to the heathen in your stocking-feet.

When they had decided that such a life would not do for him, his training had almost entirely unfitted him for any other active calling. The strict propriety with which he had been brought up had resulted in weak lungs, poor digestion, sluggish circulation, and torpid liver. Moreover, he was troubled with the painfulest bashfulness which ever made a mother think her child too ethereal, or a dispassionate outsider regard him as too flimsy, for this world. These were weights enough to carry, even if he had not labored under that heaviest of all, a well-stored mind.

No misnomer that last to any one who has ever frequented the Atlantic Docks, or seen storage in any large port of entry. How does a storehouse look? It's a vast, dark, cold chamber-dust an inch deep on the floor, cobwebs festooning the girders—and piled from floor to ceiling on the principle of getting the largest bulk into the least room, with barrels, boxes, bales, baskets, chests, crates, and carboys—merchandise of all description, from the rough, raw material to the most exquisite choses de luxe. The inmost layers are inextricable without pulling down the outer ones. If you want a particular case of broadcloth you must clear yourself an alleyway through a hundred tierces of hams, and last week's entry of clayed sugars is inaccessible without tumbling on your head a mountain of Yankee notions.

In my nephew's unfortunate youth such storage as this had minds. As long as the crown of his brain's arch was not crushed in by some intellectual Furman Street diaster, those stevedores of learning, the schoolmasters, kept on unloading the Rome and Athens lighters into a boy's crowded skull, and breaking out of the hold of that colossal old junk, The Pure Mathematics, all the formulas which could be crowded into the interstices between his Latin and Greek. At the time I introduce Billy, both Lu and her husband were much changed. They had gained a great deal in width of view and liberality of judgment. They read Dickens and Thackeray with avidity; went now and then to the opera; proposed to let Billy take a quarter at Dod-worth's; had statues in their parlor without any thought of shame at their lack of petticoats, and did multitudes of things which, in their early married life, they would have considered shocking. Part of this change was due to the great increase of travel, the wonderful progress in art and refinement which has enlarged this generation's thought and corrected its ignorant opinions; infusing cosmopolitanism into our manners by a revolution so gradual that its subjects were a new people before their