"Now you must not expect from me," said Mr. Wyndham, "exciting tales of adventure, and hairbreadth escapes by sea and land. I have never read a dime novel in my life, and therefore couldn't undertake to rival them in highway robbery, scalping Indians, and bowie-knives and revolvers. My heroes were never left on a desert island, nor escaped with difficulty from the hands of cannibals, nor were pursued by hungry wolves; and never even saw a lion or tiger except behind the bars of a menagerie. They were not strikingly handsome nor charmingly hideous, nor had they rich uncles to die opportunely and leave them heirs to a few millions; indeed, they were very much such young men as you see every day walking the streets of your own city. "I would gladly leave my name entirely out of the story if I could; but as it is an 'o'er true tale,' and I happened to be mixed up with the other two, whom I have known from childhood, I am very sure my dear nephews and nieces will not accuse me of egotism. It is the other two who are my heroes--not myself. "John Howard and Mortimer Willing were my schoolmates, in the same class for years, neighbors and playfellows, so that I know them well. And I speak of them the more freely because they are now both living at a great distance from here, one being the honored Governor of a Western State, and the other residing in a remote town in the interior of Texas. Such are the changes in our land of freedom. "But to begin with our school-days. We had not a genius in the class, neither had we a dunce; we were average boys, digging our way through the classics and mathematics, and not too familiar with science, history and geography. The world we live in was not much studied then. Such minor knowledge we were somehow expected to pick up at home, and we did after a fashion. I liked both these boys; but while Willing was the more self-possessed, showy and brilliant, I always felt Howard to be the most true; he was the very soul of honor, as transparent as glass without a flaw in it. Willing did things with a dash, and by his superior tact and ready language often appeared to know more than he really did. If he got into a scrape he was pretty sure to get out of it smoothly. "I have sometimes known him, for example, to go unprepared to a recitation, depending upon his luck not to be called upon to recite, when, with his ready wit and retentive memory, he would gather up what it required hard study for the rest of us to put into our craniums. But it sometimes happened that Dame Fortune, wicked jade! forsook him, and Willing had to march up, as we thought, to certain disgrace. But whatever forsook him, one thing never did--invincible assurance. He would bear himself in so composed a manner, talk round the subject so ably, and bring what little he knew so prominently forward, that the professor himself was often deceived, and was sometimes entrapped into telling the very thing Willing most wanted to know.