night to you, my bouchal boy, and it's a pack you might throw into a
corner of your sack." "Cards!" replied Wilkinson; "no sir, but my
pocket chess box will be at your service." "Chess be hanged," said the
lawyer; "but, see here, are they checkers when you turn them upside
down? If they are, it's I'm your man."

On Tuesday morning, about eight o'clock, there appeared at the Brock
Street Station of the Northern Railway, two well-dressed men with shiny
knapsacks on their shoulders. They had no blackthorns, for Wilkinson had
said it would be much more romantic to cut their own sticks in the bush,
to which Coristine had replied that, if the bush was as full of
mosquitos as one he had known, he would cut his stick fast enough. They
were the astonishment, rather than the admiration, of all beholders, who
regarded them as agents, and characterized the way in which they carried
their samples as the latest thing from the States. For a commencement,
this was humiliating, so that the jaunty lawyer twisted his moustache
fiercely, and felt inclined to quarrel with the self-possessed,
clean-shaven space between Wilkinson's elaborate side-whiskers. But the
pedagogue, in his suavest manner, remarked that Cicero, in his _De
Natura Deorum_, makes Cotta call the common herd both fools and
lunatics, whose opinion is of no moment whatever. "Why, then," he asked,
"should we trouble our minds with what it pleases them to think? It is
for us to educate public opinion--to enlighten the darkness of the
masses. Besides, if you look about, you will see that those who are
doing the giggling are girls, sir, positively girls."

"Your hand on that, Farquhar, my boy; if it keeps the hussies off, I'll
wear a knapsack every day of my life."

Coristine did not know where he was going, being subject to the superior