WAIFE.--“He has his reasons for it; and indeed there are many worthy persons who disapprove of anything that savours of magical practices. Mop intimates that on entering public life one should beware of offending the respectable prejudices of a class.” Mr. Waife then, once more resorting to the recesses of scholastic memory, plucked therefrom, somewhat by the head and shoulders, sundry names reverenced in a by-gone age. He thought of the seven wise men of Greece, but could only recall the nomenclature of two out of the--even,--a sad proof of the distinction between collegiate fame and popular renown. He called Thales; he called Bion. Mop made no response. “Wonderful intelligence!” said Waife; “he knows that Thales and Bion would not draw!--obsolete.” Mop was equally mute to Aristotle. He pricked up his cars at Plato, perhaps because the sound was not wholly dissimilar from that of Ponto,--a name of which he might have had vague reminiscences. The Romans not having cultivated an original philosophy, though they contrived to produce great men without it, Waife passed by that perished people. He crossed to China, and tried Confucius. Mop had evidently never heard of him. “I am at the end of my list, so far as the wise men are concerned,” said Waife, wiping his forehead. “If Mop were to distinguish himself by valour, one would find heroes by the dozen,--Achilles, and Hector, and Julius Caesar, and Pompey, and Bonaparte, and Alexander the Great, and the Duke of Marlborough. Or, if he wrote poetry, we could fit him to a hair. But wise men certainly are scarce, and when one has hit on a wise man’s name it is so little known to the vulgar that it would carry no more weight with it than Spot or Toby. But necessarily some name the dog must have, and take to sympathetically.” Sophy meanwhile had extracted the dominos from Waife’s bundle, and with the dominos an alphabet and a multiplication-table in printed capitals. As the Comedian’s one eye rested upon the last, he exclaimed, “But after all, Mop’s great strength will probably be in arithmetic, and the science of numbers is the root of all wisdom. Besides, every man, high and low, wants to make a fortune, and associations connected with addition and multiplication are always pleasing. Who, then, is the sage at computation most universally known? Unquestionably Cocker! He must take to that, Cocker, Cocker” (commandingly),--“C-o-c-k-e-r” (with persuasive sweetness). Mop looked puzzled; he put his head first on one side, then on the other. SOPHY (with mellifluous endearment).--“Cocker, good Cocker; Cocker dear!” BOTH.--“Cocker, Cocker, Cocker!” Excited and bewildered, Mop put up his head, and gave vent to his perplexities in a long and lugubrious howl, to which certainly none who heard it could have desired addition or multiplication.