Look at Billy, for instance. I could not have gotten on at all without him. In the first place, no Christmas party at Elmington could have been complete without him and his jovial laugh. It would have been against all nature not to have invited him, and equally against Billy’s nature to have stayed away. But as ill luck would have it, his girl, though of a different county, must needs be of the party; but I, knowing nothing of this, caused him to gallop up to the Hall, that cold Christmas Eve, simply that he might enliven the company with his “Arkansas Traveller” and the rest of his not very classic repertoire, and still more by his memorable dive under the table. Now I like my Billy; but his loves are not to our purpose. And so—for I cannot have the course of my story marred any longer by his antics—I have shipped him off to the University. Imagine him bursting into No. 28, East Lawn, and shaking his room-mate’s hand to the verge of dislocation. Five or six cronies have crowded in to welcome the truant back (writhing, each in turn, under the grasp of his obtrusively honest hand). “No, Tom, you need not take that old gourd out of the box. My fiddling days are over.” “What!” exclaimed an indignant chorus. “Come back solemn?” asked Tom. “Bad luck?” Billy colored a little. “Solemn? Not I. But oh, boys, I have such a story to tell you! You like to hear _me_ scrape,—wh-e-e-w!” “What is it?” Jones threw back his head and gave a roar as though Niagara laughed. While he is telling the story of his discomfiture we will take our leave of him; for as soon as the chorus have departed, he will begin to tell his friend Tom about his girl, and we have no time to listen to any more of that. But he is such a good fellow that I think we may forgive him the delay his loves have cost us. It is somewhat harder to pardon Charley’s falling in love so inopportunely; but even as to him my heart relents when I remember that it was his first offence, and how penitent, how sheepish, even, were his looks, whenever I alluded to his fall. Let him go on casting out of the corners of his eyes timid, admiring glances at the inimitable Alice; drinking in deep, intoxicating draughts of her merry, laughter-spangled talk; happy in her presence; in her absence fiercely wondering why, in this otherwise wisely-ordered world (as we Virginians have been taught to believe it), he alone was a stammering idiot. Let all this go on, and more; but as with Jones, so with Charley, their loves must equally be brushed from the path of this story.