pattern, cutting his hair to match mine, and teaching him how to wear
and how to take off gold-bowed spectacles! Really, they were
electroplate, and the glass was plain (for the poor fellow's eyes were
excellent). Then in four successive afternoons I taught him four
speeches. I had found these would be quite enough for the
supernumerary-Sepoy line of life, and it was well for me they were.
For though he was good-natured, he was very shiftless, and it was, as
our national proverb says, "like pulling teeth" to teach him. But at
the end of the next week he could say, with quite my easy and frisky
air:

1. "Very well, thank you. And you?" This for an answer to casual
salutations.

2. "I am very glad you liked it."

3. "There has been so much said, and, on the whole, so well said, that
I will not occupy the time."

4. "I agree, in general, with my friend on the other side of the
room."

At first I had a feeling that I was going to be at great cost for
clothing him. But it proved, of course, at once, that, whenever he was
out, I should be at home. And I went, during the bright period of his
success, to so few of those awful pageants which require a black
dress-coat and what the ungodly call, after Mr. Dickens, a white
choker, that in the happy retreat of my own dressing-gowns and jackets
my days went by as happily and cheaply as those of another Thalaba.
And Polly declares there was never a year when the tailoring cost so