"Foster-father!" echoed the other, while his eyes were dancing with malicious mirth. "Well, for a foster-father, perhaps, it might be fair enough; but when we come to think of what a real father will do for a son, we can't say much for what he has done for you--especially when we consider what he ought to have done for your mother, that he left undone." Here he looked Walter full in the face. The young fellow stood before him with heaving chest and quivering nostril, in fearful agitation. He staggered back, and leaned against one of the trees that formed the avenue. With a shriek of sardonic laughter: "Ha! is it possible?" he cried, "just look at him! he really has no suspicion how things stand! Ha! sancta simplicitas!--well, it was your luck that made me stop a day or two at the 'Star', and lay hold of that old fellow of a porter, who used to be in the Meister's service. I made him tell me the whole story; and, but for me, this pretty pattern of a helpless orphan might have lived to threescore-and-ten, without being so wise as to know its own father!" Walter still stood thunderstruck--his lips moved, but his voice failed him. "What makes the boy stand there, turning to stone, as though he had just heard the trumpet sound for the judgment day? I say, don't you go on being the soft chap you are, that anybody can take and twist to their own purposes. You open your eyes, and look sharp, and take what rightfully belongs to you. Take my advice--maintain your place in the world in a proper manner, even if you did come into it in a manner that may be called less proper. "Come, let us be walking. I have a long way to go, and feel a most desperate desire to get out of sight of that den of Philistines behind us." "Peter!" said Walter, struggling painfully to recover his composure; "Is there more in what you have just been telling me, than mere talk and gossipping nonsense?" "Ask the old one, if you don't believe me. Ha! shouldn't I like to see his face, when you come upon him unawares, and call him 'Dad!' And I tell you it is all as true, and as well proved as twice two. And if you had not been really as great a baby as they took such pains to make you, you would have put this and that together, and worked out your little reckoning years ago. I did, for one, as soon as ever I put my nose into the house. I sometimes tried to give you a hint; and just because you took no notice, 'Aha!' thinks I, 'he knows all about it, and makes believe not to; and of course he has his reasons.'