The boy is on that side now, balanced on the broadest stone, and preparing for a great effort with a new worm: his eyes are still shining with unexhausted excitement, and his dirty little hands are trembling. A baker's dozen of innocent fishes swim lazily to and fro in full view, with all suspicion disarmed.

The catastrophe, which for a quarter of a century has returned upon the odour of that horrible mud, now happens. The poor little angler has slipped upon the stone, lost his balance, and is flat on his face in the dirty water,

"And all his trousered flanks with garlands dressed," but the garlands are of duck-weed and green slime.

His only suit, except his Sunday best, is utterly and hopelessly ruined by mud and filth he has to face the mother who made it, and, what is worse, the jeering boys in the street: he has to leave the merry fish unharmed, while he learns one of the bitterest lessons of life in his undisciplined heart. He is defeated, disgraced, and dirty, and the cup of infant misery, full to the brim, is drained to the dregs.

I know that on sundry subsequent occasions we caught perch in that pond, and, what is perhaps more remarkable, ate them afterwards; but how many, or when, or under what circumstances of happiness, I can no more recall than I can find in my present person reliable evidence of identity with my early pre-school self. I can only say that no later triumph ever served to obliterate the sting of that first defeat, and that the whole play is re-enacted, as I have set it down, whenever the moist and noisome smell of a similar slime rises from a bypath of maturer life.

X.

In Far Lochaber.

"Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered." Cymbeline.

WHEN does a man not look at his best? Vide "PUNCH" passim. Many occasions, not illustrated in his merry pages, occur to the mind. A man does not look at his best when he has just been dragged to light from one of those hiding-places "known to members of the House of Commons," and is forced to record a vote directly contrary to his conscience or his pledges; or when he is compelled reluctantly to admit in the witness-box of a court of justice, that he uses a code, in cabling to his agents in South Africa, which contains a cipher meaning, as shown by the key, "Send me a lying telegram in plain words." A woman

does not look at her best when she is drinking porter; and a boy only looks at his best when he is asleep.

All of which is the prelude to saying I once found Anderson searching for a lost address. He was sitting in his shirt-sleeves at his writing-table, surrounded by the débris of a large blotting-pad; half a dozen drawers were pulled open, one being upside down on the floor; papers of all kinds were scattered about; and the attitude of my friend expressed the extreme of perplexity. His yellowish-red hair was standing up in mutiny over a puckered forehead; and his pipe was not only out, but held firmly upside down by his strong white teeth, as if he had arrived at the point when he was morally obliged to grit them on something, or explode. He waved a greeting with a large inky sheet of blotting-paper in each hand, and expressed his feelings in one short, sharp word, which included the whole gamut of feeling.

"You have lost something?" I suggested. "Your penetration is as remarkable as my stupidity," he said. "I have lost James's

address, and James goes near to lose one of the best letters ever penned by a fond uncle. He is at some beastly place between Kingussie and Fort William,-a kind of mixture of Kirriemuir and Tora-na-freer, so far as I recollect. I wrote it on one of these infernal sheets, mais laquelle, laquelle?"

"Perhaps you have a letter from him," I answered.

"That's in one of these drawers," he said, indicating the hay-cock, "unless I lent it to a fellow at the office."

Anderson did not look at his best.

"What would Sherlock Holmes do?" I asked.

"He would crib something from Edgar Allan Poe," replied Anderson tartly.

Jove, The Purloined Letter '!

"By

Of course."

He leant over his correspondence-basket with a scrutinising glance at the neatly-docketed letters, and then rang the bell.

"Tell your mistress," he said to the parlourmaid, "that I have found what I was looking for, and that it was in its proper place."

'Discipline must be observed," he said (for