That young gentleman was what he himself would have called "down in the dumps." The obligations of gentility extend from the highest stratum of society to the lowest, and Mr. Piper felt that this morning he had lost caste in the eyes of Mr. Hammond--his guide, philosopher, and--in a far-off, Olympian kind of way--his friend. Mr. Hammond, walking down a by-street on his way to business, had come suddenly on Pod, who, in company with several other youths, was scraping with a knife the sweet interstices of an empty sugar-cask that was standing on the pavement in front of a grocer's shop. Unseen till he laid his gloved hand on Pod's shoulder, Mr. Hammond had said to him: "Here's a penny for you, Piper, to buy some sweetmeats with, but do, for goodness' sake, leave the sugar-cask alone." And so, with a smile and a sneer, had gone daintily on his way. Pod felt as if he could have bitten his head off, had such an anatomical feat been at all possible. He would not have cared half so much had he been seen by anyone else--even by Kelvin himself. But to have been seen thus ignominiously engaged by the elegant, the scented, the fastidious Mr. Hammond! Besides which, this was not the first occasion on which Mr. Hammond had found him engaged in a pursuit derogatory to that assumption of manhood and gentility which it was the secret ambition of his life to maintain in the eyes of his patron. On his way home, one evening, Pod had been overtaken by a temptation which he found it impossible to resist. The temptation on this occasion took the shape of marbles. Pod had fallen in with three or four of his old schoolmates engaged in a game of knuckle-down, and, fired by the recollection of his prowess in olden days, had for once flung gentility to the winds. Carefully depositing in a corner his chimney-pot hat, for the next ten minutes he was a boy again. This time, also, it was Mr. Hammond's voice which recalled him to a consideration of how far he had forgotten himself. "Well done, Piper," he said, as he came suddenly round the corner. "With practice and perseverance you will make a tolerable player. By-the-by, I promised to buy you something on your birthday. What shall it be? A hoop, or a kite, or a pretty coloured ball that you and the baby can amuse yourselves with in wet weather?"