Fred Conyers was not over-pleased with the task assigned him. The part he liked to fill in life, and, indeed, that which he had usually performed, was the Benefactor and the Patron, and it was but an ungracious office for him to have to cut the wings and disfigure the plumage of his generosity. He made two, three, four attempts at conveying his intentions, but with none was he satisfied; so he ended by simply saying, “I have something of importance to tell you, and which, not being altogether pleasant, it will be better to say than to write; so I have to beg you will come up here at once, and see me.” Scarcely was this letter sealed and addressed than he bethought him of the awkwardness of presenting Tom to his brother-officers, or the still greater indecorum of not presenting him. “How shall I ask him to the mess, with the certainty of all the impertinences he will be exposed to?--and what pretext have I for not offering him the ordinary attention shown to every stranger?” He was, in fact, wincing under that public opinion he had only a few moments before declared he could afford to despise. “No,” said he, “I have no right to expose poor Tom to this. I 'll drive over myself to the village, and if any advice or counsel be needed, he will be amongst those who can aid him.” He ordered his servant to harness his handsome roan, a thoroughbred of surpassing style and action, to the dog-cart,--not over-sorry to astonish his friend Tom by the splendor of a turn-out that had won the suffrages of Tattersall's,--and prepared for his mission to Inistioge. Was it with the same intention of “astonishing” Tom Dill that Conyers bestowed such unusual attention upon his dress? At his first visit to the “Fisherman's Home” he had worn the homely shooting-jacket and felt hat which, however comfortable and conventional, do not always redound to the advantage of the wearer, or, if they do, it is by something, perhaps, in the contrast presented to his ordinary appearance, and the impression ingeniously insinuated that he is one so unmistakably a gentleman, no travesty of costume can efface the stamp. It was in this garb Polly had seen him, and if Polly Dill had been a duchess it was in some such garb she would have been accustomed to see her brother or her cousin some six out of every seven mornings of the week; but Polly was not a duchess: she was the daughter of a village doctor, and might, not impossibly, have acquired a very erroneous estimate of his real pretensions from having beheld him thus attired. It was, therefore, entirely by a consideration for her ignorance of the world and its ways that he determined to enlighten her.