"Helton," he said one night, "I wish things could talk--these old chairs and the table and that big worn-out couch, for instance." "Lucky thing they can't, sir," mumbled Helton, holding the seam of the table-cloth in his teeth while he folded it. "Why?" said Lewis. "Why should it be lucky they can't? Don't you suppose if they had the power of talk, they'd have the power of discretion as well, just as we have?" "I don't know about that, sir," said Helton. "Things is servants just like us serving-men is. The more wooden a serving-man is in the matter of talk, the easier it is for 'im to get a plice. If you ask me, sir, I would s'y as chairs is wooden and walls stone an' brick for the comfort of their betters, an' that they 'aven't any too much discretion as it is, let alone talking." "Nelton," said Lewis, "I've been waiting to ask you something. I wonder if you could tell me." "Can't s'y in the dark," said Nelton. "It's this," said Lewis. "Everybody here--all dad's friends except Lady Derl--call him Grapes Leighton. Why? I've started to ask him two or three times, but somehow something else seems to crop up in his mind, and he doesn't give me a chance to finish." Nelton's lowered eyes flashed a shrewd look at Lewis's face. "The exercise of discretion ennobles the profession," he said, and stopped, a dazed, pleased look in his face at hearing his own rhyme. He laid the table-cloth down, took from his pocket the stub of a pencil, and wrote the words on his cuff. Then he picked up the cloth, laid it over his arm, and opened the door. As he went out he paused and said over his shoulder: "Master Lewis, it would hurt the governor's feelin's if you asked him or anybody else how he got the nime of Gripes." Let a man but feel lonely, and his mind immediately harks along the back trail of the past. In his lonely week Lewis frequently found himself thinking back. It was only by thinking back that he could stay in the flat at all. Now for the first time he realized that he had been stepping through life with seven-league boots. The future could not possibly hold for him the tremendous distances of his past. How far he had come since that first dim day at Consolation Cottage! To every grown-up there is a dim day that marks the beginning of things, the first remembered day of childhood. Lewis could not fasten on any memory older than the memory of a rickety cab, a tall, gloomy man, and then a white-clad group on the steps of Consolation Cottage. Black mammy, motherly Mrs. Leighton, curly-headed Shenton, and little Natalie, with her 'wumpled' skirt, who had stood on tiptoe to put her lips to his, appeared before him now as part of the dawn of life.