"The law! Smalley, do you, a clergyman, advise me to set unfortunate people by the ears?" Mr. Smalley looked startled, and took refuge in the healing art. "The medical profession affords opportunities of benevolence--" "And of being called up at two in the morning, to the relief of apoplectic gentlemen and ladies in distress." "Shall I then suggest the army?" "Would you advise me to make fighting a profession?" "I fear the navy is open to the same objection," gently observed Mr. Smalley; but he suddenly brightened, laid one hand on the arm of Cornelius, and, raising the forefinger of the other, to impress on him the importance of the discovery, he said earnestly, "My dear friend, how odd it is that you should have forgotten the wide world of science, literature, and art, for which you are so wonderfully gifted!" "Am I?" carelessly replied Cornelius. He sat on the hearth, facing the fire; he stooped, took up the poker, and began to drive in the coals, much in his sister's way. "Why, you are a first-rate scholar." "Learning is worthless now. Besides, cannot I enjoy my old authors without driving bargains out of them?" "But science?" "I have no patience for it; then it is hard work, and I am indolent." "And literature?" "Bid me become one of the builders of the Tower of Babel," hastily interrupted Cornelius. "No, Smalley, the office, with its paltry salary, moderate labour, and, heaven be praised for it, its absence from care, is the thing for me." He laid down the poker, and reclined back in his chair with careless indolence. Mr. Smalley slowly rubbed his forehead with his forefinger, and looked at Cornelius through his glasses and over his neckcloth, with a gently puzzled air. Then he turned to Miss O'Reilly, and said simply-- "Your brother's philosophy puts me to shame, Ma'am: yet I used to think him ambitious, and I remember that once--I mean no reflection--one of the older boys having doubted his ability to--to do something or other--our dear friend being somewhat hasty, pushed him so that he fell." "Say I knocked him down," replied Cornelius, reddening and trying to laugh. "Well, those days are gone, and with them the knocking-down propensity, as well as the ambition: I have become as meek and lowly as a lamb." He threw back his head with the clear keen look of a hawk, and a curl of the lip implying no great degree of meekness. "Yes," quietly said Kate from her corner, "the child is not always father of the man." Cornelius bit his lip; Mr. Trim, who was again napping, woke up with a Ha! ha! Then, standing up to look at the clock on the mantelpiece, asked Mr. Smalley "if he called this Christian conduct."