“I could do it again,” communed my aunt to herself. There was a suggestion of vindictiveness in her tones. “It's easy enough. Look at the sort of fools that are agreeable.” “I'm sure you could be if you tried,” urged my mother. “Let 'em have it,” continued my aunt, still to herself; “that's the way to teach 'em sense. Let 'em have it.” And strange though it may seem, my aunt was right and my mother altogether wrong. My father was the first to notice the change. “Nothing the matter with poor old Fan, is there?” he asked. It was one evening a day or two after my aunt had carried her threat into effect. “Nothing happened, has there?” “No,” answered my mother, “nothing that I know of.” “Her manner is so strange,” explained my father, “so--so weird.” My mother smiled. “Don't say anything to her. She's trying to be agreeable.” My father laughed and then looked wistful. “I almost wish she wouldn't,” he remarked; “we were used to it, and she was rather amusing.” But my aunt, being a woman of will, kept her way; and about the same time that occurred tending to confirm her in her new departure. This was the introduction into our small circle of James Wellington Gadley. Properly speaking, it should have been Wellington James, that being the order in which he had been christened in the year 1815. But in course of time, and particularly during his school career, it had been borne in upon him that Wellington is a burdensome name for a commonplace mortal to bear, and very wisely he had reversed the arrangement. He was a slightly pompous but simpleminded little old gentleman, very proud of his position as head clerk to Mr. Stillwood, the solicitor to whom my father was now assistant. Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal dated back to the Georges, and was a firm bound up with the history--occasionally shady--of aristocratic England. True, in these later years its glory was dwindling. Old Mr. Stillwood, its sole surviving representative, declined to be troubled with new partners, explaining frankly, in answer to all applications, that the business was a dying one, and that attempting to work it up again would be but putting new wine into worn-out skins. But though its clientele was a yearly diminishing quantity, much business yet remained to it, and that of a good class, its name being still a synonym for solid respectability; and my father had deemed himself fortunate indeed in securing such an appointment. James Gadley had entered the firm as office boy in the days of its pride, and had never awakened to the fact that it was not still the most important legal firm within the half mile radius from Lombard Street. Nothing delighted him more than to discuss over and over again the many strange affairs in which Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal had been concerned, all of which he had at his tongue's tip. Could he find a hearer, these he would reargue interminably, but with professional reticence, personages becoming Mr. Y. and Lady X.; and places, “the