Still, when all was said, Constable was the nearest thing to a gentleman that would cross the path of girls in Jack’s circle, and Jack reflected the girls would make the most of Oliver, and he would become the rage. That goose Liza Polley, who pretended to read collections of poetry, would be making a hero of Constable, and that minx ’Mily would be treating the fellow to some of her sauce. Jack, on his part and speaking impartially, was disappointed in Constable’s abilities and attainments. It was all very well to admit that Oliver Constable had got a fine education and had not become an insolent shaver on the strength of it. Hang him! he was too near the real Mackay for that. But actually he did not know anything worth caring about. He could not put Jack up to a single wrinkle on any point he was interested in, with regard to which Constable had been in a position to have become a valuable authority if he were not a noodle in some respects. Jack had sought to balance the effeminate nature of his daily occupations in matching skeins of silk and turning over gloves, by an excess of manliness in his recreations. He went in strongly for games and sport. He could not often get away to attend a morning or an afternoon cricket match, for his father had old-fashioned strict notions of what was due to business and business hours. Therefore Jack’s pink and white complexion lost the chance of being tanned brown. But he played cricket and bowls with a club of Friarton shopkeepers every fine evening all the summer. He took in ‘Bell’s Life;’ he kept a bull-terrier, and sometimes managed to engage it in a ratting match. And he betted as regularly on the Derby and the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race as if he had driven more than once in his life to Epsom Downs, wearing a green veil and scattering flour on the way, or as if he had a hereditary association with either University. Jack found Oliver Constable, for all his so-called attainments, lamentably behind him in the important matters referred to. Oliver could play cricket decently indeed, but he could do so when he was a boy. And it was only by dragging what information there was to get, word by word, out of him, that a Friarton cricketer could ascertain how the nobs at the University played their game. Constable did not read a sporting paper. He had not been in the habit of betting, though he did not preach a sermon against the practice, possibly he meant his silent example to serve as a text. Altogether, and this was a consolation, if he said as little to the girls about the college spreads and blow-outs, he might not take the wind out of Jack’s sails to the extent he had apprehended. But the deficiency certainly rendered Oliver less of an acquisition to his old acquaintances. END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET