"A very comfortable code. I wish I could share it."

"Well, you will some of these days; indeed, you do now practically. But the subject is too long to talk of here. But as I know you won't go into the church, I expect to see you settled in London before Christmas."

"What am I to live on, my dear fellow?"

"Like all good nephews, live on your uncle. Besides, you will have your fellowship; live on that, as I do."

"You have more than your fellowship; and as for my uncle, to tell you the truth, I have no fancy for living on him. I am not quite sure that he doesn't mean me to think that it's charity. However, I shall have the matter out with him now."

"Have the matter out with him!—and charity! What an ass you are! An uncle is just the same as a father."

"My uncle is not the same to me as my father."

"No; and by all accounts it's lucky for you that he is not. Stick to your uncle, my dear fellow, and come up to London. The ball will be at your foot."

"Did you ever read Marryat's novel, Harcourt?"

"What, Peter Simple?"

"No, that other one: I think of going out as another Japhet in search of a father. I have a great anxiety to know what mine's like. It's fourteen years now since I saw him."

"He is at Teheran, isn't he?"

"At Hong Kong, I think, just at present; but I might probably catch him at Panama; he has something to do with the isthmus there."

"You wouldn't have half the chance that Japhet had, and would only lose a great deal of time. Besides, if you talk of means, that would want money."

They were now walking back towards Oxford, and had been talking about fifty indifferent subjects, when Bertram again began.

"After all, there's only one decent career for a man in England."

"And what is the one decent career?"

"Politics and Parliament. It's all very well belonging to a free nation, and ruling oneself, if one can be one of the rulers. Otherwise, as far as I can see, a man will suffer less from the stings of pride under an absolute monarch. There, only one man has beaten you in life; here, some seven hundred and fifty do so,—not to 

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