had as yet shown no decided talent in any of these particulars, except in the last-mentioned one. Among a mass of other inconsistencies, which almost likened him to a schoolboy who is having a romp through life instead of playing the game seriously, the Squire, while considering his children in the light of impedimenta, yet cherished a passionate affection for the least worthy of them all, for the one to whom nature had decreed that he should bequeath, with a liberality he had shown his children in no other respect, the largest share of his own failings. Jack Raleigh was handsome, fascinating, improvident to a degree, with no fixed code of morality and no definite powers of reasoning, ruling himself and his actions entirely by a kind of blind instinct such as we find in healthy animals or in children. His love, like his antipathy, was of an elementary character; if he found himself in a complicated situation, which was not rare, he would merely choose the most pleasant course open to him, without giving it a moment's consideration, and would follow it gayly until another obstacle arose which would have to be treated in a similar manner. Whether he was the happier for feeling nothing deeply, belongs to those questions which are argued by thousands of lives every day without a conclusive answer being found to them. That his temperament was the sunnier for it and that his misdeeds were less harmful, is most certain; and since the God whom he believed in, if he believed in one at all, was a kind of inexhaustible Being who could offer him as many fresh opportunities as he had squandered already, and seemed to be the cause, in some indirect way that Jack never attempted to fathom, of occasional magnificent music in churches and cathedrals, his religion as well as his excellent digestion saved him from the fits of depression that usually accompany the sanguine disposition. He had discovered before he was out of his teens that England was not the place for one so restless as he, and he had been sent out to more than one colony "to try his luck," as the Squire said, in a vague hope of shifting his uneasy responsibility for his son's actions on to fortune. But fortune, although not philanthropic in her tendencies, and having no nobler vocation to distract her from her plain duty of looking after her prodigal sons, refused to help him, and he inevitably returned home with more debts, more friends, more anecdotes, but no more stability than before.