'half holiday' in a school-room. He dishonest! I should as soon have suspected the noonday sun of being a dark lantern! I remember, when he and I were walking home from wild-duck shooting in advance of our companions, a short conversation between us that touched me greatly, for it showed that, under all his levity, there were sound sense and right feeling. I asked him about his son, then a boy at school. 'Why, as it was the Christmas vacation, he had refused our host's suggestion to let the lad come down there?' 'Ah,' said he, 'don't fancy that I will lead my son to grow up a scatter-brained good-for-naught like his father. His society is the joy of my life; whenever I have enough in my pockets to afford myself that joy, I go and hire a quiet lodging close by his school, to have him with me from Saturday till Monday all to myself—where he never hears wild fellows call me "Willy," and ask me to mimic. I had hoped to have spent this vacation with him in that way. But his school-bill was higher than usual, and after paying it I had not a guinea to spare—obliged to come here where they lodge and feed me for nothing; the boy's uncle on the mother's side—a respectable man in business—kindly takes him home for the holidays; but did not ask me, because his wife—and I don't blame her—thinks I'm too wild for a city clerk's sober household.'
"I asked Will Losely what he meant to do with his son, and hinted that I might get the boy a commission in the army with-out purchase.
"'No,' said Willy, 'I know what it is to set up for a gentleman on the capital of a beggar. It is to be a shuttlecock between discontent and temptation, I would not have my lost wife's son waste his life as I have done. He would be more spoiled, too, than I have been. The handsomest boy you ever saw—and bold as a lion. Once in that set'—(pointing over his shoulders toward some of our sporting comrades, whose loud laughter every now and then reached our ears)—'once in that set he would never be out of it—fit for nothing. I swore to his mother, on her death-bed, that I would bring him up to avoid my errors—that he should be no hanger-on and led-Captain! Swore to her that he should be reared according to his real station—the station of his mother's kin (I have no station)—and if I can but see him an honest British trader—respectable, upright, equal to the highest—because no rich man's dependent, and no poor man's jest—my ambition will be satisfied. And now you understand. Sir, why my boy is not here.' You would say a father who spoke thus had a man's honest stuff in him. Eh, Lionel?"
