Sometimes, even when you have a vantage space, you are strangely jockeyed out of it before you are aware. Say the house is to be painted before you go into it. Being quite at your ease, you are satisfied that the painters are engaged about two months before the term. You know very well that these men are the greatest of all rascals; that, indeed, they have no other principle within them but just to put people to as much trouble as possible. But two months! that must surely be sufficient. Well, the painters come all this time before the term, and, like the ancient Spanish navigators, take possession of a newly-discovered country, mark the job for their own, by planting a nasty pail in one room, and setting up a brush on end against the wall in another. You look in about a week after, and see the pail and the brush _in statu quo_: the fellows have as yet done nothing but taken _seisin_.[3] You think this is not just quite right, and calling in a cool easy way at the master’s as you go home, express your wish that the job should be immediately proceeded with, being anxious to get into the house as long before the term as possible. The painter is all politeness, and promises to _put men upon the house_ next morning, so that it will be got ready for your reception in _no time_—by which he appears to mean a space of time so brief as not to be worth defining, but which you eventually find to have signified that the job would be finished _not at all in time_. As you come home to your dinner next afternoon, you take a turn that way to see how “the men” are getting on. The house is as empty and desolate as ever; but, from a change in the relative situations of the pail and the brush, you see that they _have_ been there. On inspecting things more minutely, you find that one bed-room has been washed down, and is now, to use a kitchen phrase, _swimming_. Well, this is a beginning, you think. “The men” have been doing what they could to-day, and to-morrow they would be a good way advanced. On this supposition, you take no more thought about the house for three or four days more, when, dropping in as before, you have the satisfaction of seeing that there is _another pail_, and that the ceiling of the dining-room has been whitewashed. Still, dilatory as the rascals evidently are, you hardly think there is a sufficient _casus fœderis_, or breach of treaty, to entitle you to go and blow up the polite man at head-quarters. You suffer for another day; and then, dropping in again, you find a little Flibbertigibbet of a boy exerting himself with his tiny arms to whitewash the ceiling of the parlour. Well, my boy, where are “the men?” This is your question; but for answer you only learn that there have never been any men in the matter—nobody has ever been here but Flibbertigibbet himself. You feel, at this intelligence, almost as much bewildered and obfusculated as George the Second was when he asked an Irish sergeant at a review after