"No, it wasn't that; to be told to avoid an impossibility would have struck me as novel. Never mind; I was going to ask who that was I saw you speaking to at the King's Cross Terminus yesterday." "At King's Cross?" said Prescott, colouring; "oh, that was a friend of mine, a clergyman." "Ah!" said Pringle, quietly, "I thought so. He had on a blue bonnet and a black-lace shawl. Neat foot he's got; those parsons are always so particular about their stockings!" "Don't be an ass, George!" growled Prescott, in an undertone. "All right, old boy!" said Pringle, in the same key. "Forgot we weren't alone. Nobody heard, I think; but I'll soon change the subject;" and he commenced whistling _Il Bacio_, loud and shrill. "Mr. Pringle! Mr. Pringle!" screamed Mr. Dibb. Mr. Pringle held up his hand as if deprecating interruption until he had come to the end of the bar, when he said, with mock politeness, "Sir to you!" "How often have I begged you, sir, not to whistle during official hours? It is impossible for me to write my minutes while you're whistling." "Write your minutes!" said Mr. Pringle. "Sir, we have the authority of A. Tennyson, Esquire, the Poet of the Age, if my honourable friend in the Isle of Wight will so permit me to call him, for saying that 'Lightlier move the minutes fledged with music.' Though that even my whistling could make your minutes move lightly, with due respect to Alfred, I doubt." "Mr. Kinchenton," cried Mr. Dibb, now a dirty white with rage, "I must request you, as head of this room, to call upon Mr. Pringle not to forget himself." "My dear sir," said Pringle, "there's no one I think of so much." "George," said Mr. Kinchenton quietly, "pray be quiet!" "Certainly, Padre; I'm dumb! Thank Heaven and the Early Closing Association, to-day's a half holiday, and we cut it at two." "Ah, to be sure!" said Kinchenton, anxious to atone for even the slight show of authority which his previous words might have suggested; "there are grand doings this afternoon at the Eyres', at Hampstead. I'm going to take my Percy there. Athletic sports, running, leaping, and all the rest of it." "Ha! ha!" said Pringle; "at the Eyres', eh? 'The merry brown Eyres come leaping,' as Kingsley has it. What a pity they haven't asked me!" "You're going, Prescott, I suppose?" asked Kinchenton. "The Eyres are friends of yours--you're going to their fête?" "I! no, Padre," was the reply; "I'm not going." "Oh, he's very bad!" said Pringle, in a whisper, "He's got it awfully, but he'll get better." 'Now he has turned himself wholly to love and follows a damsel, Caring no more for honour, or glory, or Pallas Athené.' Kingsley again--hem!" "I wonder, Mr. Pringle," said Mr. Dibb, "that you do not attempt to form some more permanent style of reading than the mere poetry, scraps of which you are always quoting. For my own part, I consider poetry the flimsiest kind of writing extant."