This opportunity to visit the old homestead where his father had passed his boyhood was peculiarly welcome to Mr. Robert just now. There had always been to him a sort of glamour about the names Virginia and Shirley. His father's stories about his own childhood had made a deep impression on the mind of the boy, and to him Shirley was a palace and Virginia a fairy land. Whenever, in childhood, he was allowed to call a calf or a pig his own, he straightway bestowed upon it one or the other of the charmed names, and fancied that the animal grew stronger and more beautiful as a consequence. He had always intended to go to Shirley, but had never done so; just as you and I, reader, have always meant to do several scores of things that we have never done, though we can hardly say why. Just now, however, Mr. Billy's plan for his cousin was more than ever agreeable to Mr. Robert for various present and unusual reasons. He knew next to nobody in or about Philadelphia outside the precincts of the collegiate institute, and to hunt up acquaintances inside that institution was naturally enough not exactly to his taste. He had several months of time to dispose of in some way, and until Billy suggested the visit to Virginia, the best he had been able to do in the way of devising a time-killer was to plan a solitary wandering among the mountainous districts of Pennsylvania. Ordinarily he would have enjoyed such a journey very much, but just now he knew that Mr. Robert Pagebrook could hardly find a less agreeable companion than Mr. Robert Pagebrook himself. That little affair with Miss Nellie Currier kept coming up in his memory, and if the reader be a man it is altogether probable that he knows precisely how the memory of that story affected our young gentleman. He wanted company, and he wanted change, and he wanted out-door exercise, and where could he find all these quite so abundant as at an old Virginian country house? His love for Miss Nellie, he was sure, was a very genuine one; but he was equally sure that it was hopeless. Indeed, now that he knew the selfish insincerity of the damsel he did not even wish that his suit had prospered. This, at any rate, is what he thought, as you did, my dear sir, when you first learned what the word "Another" means when printed with a big A; and, thinking this, he felt that the first thing to be done in the matter was to forget Miss Nellie and his love for her as speedily as possible. How far he succeeded in doing this we shall probably see in the sequel. At present we have to do with the attempt only. New scenes and new people, Mr. Pagebrook thought, would greatly aid him in his purpose, and so the trip to Virginia seemed peculiarly fitting. It thus comes about that the scene of this young man's story suddenly shifts from Philadelphia to a Virginian country house, in spite of all I can do to preserve the dramatic unity of place. Ah! if I were _making_ this story now, I could