“Few men so deep as Major Brooks
        Have drained affliction’s cup. 
      Alas! if one may trust his looks,
        I fear he’s breaking up!”

This Miss Plinlimmon, a maiden aunt of the young officer who had been slain at Badajoz, kept house for us after my sister’s death.  She was a lady of good Welsh family, who after many years of genteel poverty had come into a legacy of seven thousand pounds from an East Indian uncle; and my father—­a simple liver, content with his half-pay—­had much ado in his blindness to keep watch and war upon the luxuries she untiringly strove to smuggle upon him.  For the rest, Miss Plinlimmon wore corkscrew curls, talked sentimentally, worshipped the manly form (in the abstract) with the manly virtues, and possessed (quite unknown to herself) the heart of a lion.

Upon this unsuspected courage, and upon the strength of her affection for me, she had drawn on the day when she stood up to my father—­of whom, by the way, she was desperately afraid—­and told him that his neglect of me was a sin and a shame and a scandal.  “And a good education,” she wound up feebly, “would render Harry so much more of a companion to you.”

My father rubbed his head vaguely.  “Yes, yes, you are right.  I have been neglecting the boy.  But pray end as honestly as you began, and do not pretend to be consulting my future when you are really pleading for his.  To begin with, I don’t want a companion; next, I should not immediately make a companion of Harry by sending him away to school; and, lastly, you know as well as I, that long before he finished his schooling I should be in my grave.”

“Well, then, consider what a classical education would do for Harry!  I feel sure that had I—­pardon the supposition—­been born a man, and made conversant with the best thoughts of the ancients—­Socrates, for example—­”

“What about him?” my father demanded.

“So wise, as I have always been given to understand, yet in his own age misunderstood, by his wife especially!  And, to crown all, unless I err, drowned in a butt of hemlock!”

“Dear madam, pardon me; but how many of these accidents to Socrates are you ascribing to his classical education?”

“But it comes out in so many ways,” Miss Plinlimmon persisted; “and it does make such a difference!  There’s a je ne sais quoi.  You can tell it even in the way they handle a knife and fork!”

That evening, after supper, Miss Plinlimmon declined her customary game of cards with me, on the pretence that she felt tired, and sat for a long while fumbling with a newspaper, which I recognized for a week-old copy of the “Falmouth Packet.”  At length she rose abruptly, and, crossing over to the table where I sat playing dominoes (right hand against left), thrust the paper before me, and pointed with a trembling finger.

“There, Harry!  What would you say to that?”

I brushed my dominoes aside, and read—­