Sydie shook his head and puffed gravely at his pipe. "Thank you, sir. Cramming's not my line. As for history, I don't see anything particularly interesting in the blackguardisms of men all dust and ashes and gelatine now; if I were the Prince of Wales, I might think it my duty to inquire into the characters of my grandfathers; but not being that individual, I find the Derby list much more suited to my genius. As for the classics, they won't help me to ask for my dinner at Tortoni's, nor to ingratiate myself with the women at the Maison Dorée; and I prefer following Ovid's counsels, and enjoying the Falernian of life represented in these days by milk-punch, to plodding through the De Officiis. As for mathematics, it _may_ be something very grand to draw triangles and circles till A meets B because C is as long as D; but I know, when I did the same operation in chalk when I was a small actor on the nursery floor, my nurse (who might have gone along with the barbarian who stuck Archimedes) called me an idle brat. Well, I say, about the Long? Where are _you_ going, most grave and reverent seignior?" "Where there are no impertinent boys, if there be such a paradise on earth," rejoined Keane, lighting his pipe. "I go to my moor, of course, for the 12th, but until then I haven't made up my mind. I think I shall scamper over South America; I want freshening up, and I've a great fancy to see those buried cities, not to mention a chance of buffalo hunting." "Travelling's such a bore," interrupted Sydie, stretching himself out like an india-rubber tube. "Talk of the cherub that's always sitting up aloft to watch over poor Jack, there are always ten thousand demons watching over the life of any luckless Æothen; there are the custom-house men, whose natural prey he becomes, and the hotel-keepers, who fasten on him to suck his life-blood, and there are the mosquitoes, and other things less minute but not less agonizing; and there are guides and muleteers, and waiters and ciceroni--oh, hang it! travelling's a dreadful bore, if it were only for the inevitable widow with four daughters whom you've danced with once at a charity ball, who rushes up to you on the Boulevards or a Rhine steamer, and tacks herself on to you, and whom it's well for you if you can shake off when you scatter the dust of the city from the sole of your foot." "You can't chatter, can you?" "Yes; my frænum was happily cut when I was a baby. Fancy what a loss the world would have endured if it hadn't been!" said Sydie, lazily shutting his half-closed blue eyes. "I say, the governor has been bothering my life out to go down to St. Crucis; he's an old brick, you know, and has the primest dry in the kingdom. I wish you'd come, will you? There's capital fishing and cricketing, and you'd keep me company. Do. You shall have the best mount in the kingdom, and the General will do you no end of good on Hippocrate's rule--contrarieties cure contrarieties."