threatened. For most of the last thirty years, for example,

Then his father, who had been speaking aloud to him, whispered a word in his ear. "Shake yourself, Tom -- shake yourself, and get over it."

"Love is a very good thing, Tom, when a man can enjoy it, and make himself warm with it, and protect himself by it from selfishness and hardness of heart. But when it knocks a man's courage out of him, and makes him unfit for work, and leaves him to bemoan himself, there's nothing good in it. It's as bad as drink. Don't you know that I am doing the best I can for you, to make a man of you?"

"Then shake yourself, as I call it. It is to be done, if you set about it in earnest. Now, God bless you, my boy." Then Sir Thomas got into his boat, and left his son to go upon his travels and get himself cured by a change of scene.

I have no doubt that Tom was cured, if not before he reached New York, at any rate before he left that interesting city -- so that when he reached Niagara, which he did do in company with Mrs Thompson and her charming daughters, he entertained no idea of throwing himself down the Falls. We cannot follow him on that prolonged tour to Japan and China, and thence to Calcutta and Bombay. I fancy that he did not go on to Kabul, as before that time the Ministry in England was unfortunately changed, and the Russians had not as yet been expelled from Asia -- but I have little doubt that he obtained a great deal of very useful mercantile information, and that he will live to have a comfortable wife and a large family, and become in the course of years the senior partner in the great house of Travers and Treason. Let us, who have soft hearts, now throw our old shoes after him.

1 It has to be stated that this story was written in 1878.

CHAPTER 62 HOW VERY MUCH HE LOVED HER

We have seen how Mr Traffick was finally turned out of his father-in-law's house -- or, rather, not quite finally when we last saw him, as he continued to sleep at Queen's Gate for two or three nights after that, until he had found shelter for his head. This he did without encountering Sir Thomas, Sir Thomas pretending the while to believe that he was gone; and then in very truth his last pair of boots was removed. But his wife remained, awaiting the great occurrence with all the paternal comforts around her, Mr Traffick having been quite right in surmising that the father would not expose his daughter in her delicate condition to the inclemencies of the weather.

But this no more than natural attention on the part of the father and grandfather to the needs of his own daughter and grandchild did not in the least mitigate in the bosom of the Member of Parliament the wrath which he felt at his own expulsion. It was not, as he said to himself, the fact that he was expelled, but the coarseness of the language used. "The truth is," he said to a friend in the House, "that, though it was arranged that I should remain there till after my wife's confinement, I could not bear his language." It will probably be acknowledged that the language was of a nature not to be borne.