is, will be favorably considered. Moses will come after awhile, I suppose, and he probably has the other letter caged as a 'vallable.' Let me see what we have here from William."
With this our young gentleman opened his only remaining letter, which he had already discovered by a glance at the postmark was from a Virginian cousin. It was a mere note, in which his cousin wrote:
"A little matter of business takes me to Philadelphia next week. Shall be at Girard Ho., Thrsd morn'g. Meet me there at breakfast, but don't come too early. Train won't get in till three, so I'll sleep a little late. Sh'd you wake me too early, I'll be as cross as a $20 bank-note, and make a bad impression on you."
An amused smile played over Mr. Robert's face as he read this note over and over. What he was thinking I do not know. Aloud he said:
"What a passion my cousin has for abbreviations! One would think he had a grudge against words from the way in which he cuts them up. And what a figure of speech that is! 'As cross as a twenty-dollar bank-note!' Let me see. I may safely assume that the letters 'Thrs' with an elevated 'd' mean Thursday, and as this is Thursday, and as the letter was written last week, and as my watch tells me it is now ten o'clock, and as my boots are still unblacked, and as Moses has not yet made his appearance, it seems altogether probable that my cousin's breakfast will be postponed until the middle of the day if he waits for me to help him eat it. I am afraid he will be as cross as half a dozen bank notes of the largest denomination issued when we meet."
"Did you call, sah?" asked Moses, coming very deliberately into the room.
"I am under the impression that I did, though it requires an extraordinary exercise of the memory to recall an event which happened so long ago. Have you any 'vallables' for me?"
Moses thought he had. This was as near an approach to anything like a positive statement as Moses ever made. He would go to his room and ascertain. Among many other evidences of unusual wisdom on the part of the old negro was this, that he believed himself fully capable of recognizing a valuable letter whenever he saw it; and it was one of his self-imposed duties, whenever the post brought letters for any absent member of his constituency, to look them over and sequestrate all the "vallables" until the return of the owner, so that they might be delivered with his own hand. Returning now he brought two "vallables" for Mr. Pagebrook. One of them was a printed circular, but the other proved to be the desired letter, which was a formal tender of a professorship in a New England college, with an entirely satisfactory salary attached. Accompanying the official notice of election was a note informing him that his duties, in the event of acceptance, would not begin until the first of January, the engagement of the retiring professor terminating at that time.
Under the influence of this news our young friend's face brightened quite as perceptibly as his boots did in the hands of the old servitor. He wrote his letter of acceptance at once, and then proceeded to dress for breakfast at the Girard House, whither he walked with as light a step and as cheerful a bearing as if he had not been a sadly disappointed lover at all.
CHAPTER III.
Mr. Pagebrook Eats his Breakfast.
Robert Pagebrook had never seen his cousin, and yet they were not altogether strangers to each other. Robert's father and William Barksdale's mother were brother and sister, and Shirley, the old Virginian homestead, which had been in the family for nearly two centuries, had passed to young Barksdale's mother by the voluntary act of Robert's father when, upon coming of age, he had gone west to try his fortune in a busier world than that of the Old Dominion. The two boys, William and Robert, had corresponded quite regularly in boyhood and quite irregularly after they grew up, and so they knew each other pretty well, though, as I have said, they had never met.
"I am glad, very glad to see you, William," said Robert as he grasped his cousin's hand.
"Now don't, I beg of you. Call me Billy, or Will, or anything else you choose, old fellow, but don't call me William, whatever you do. Nobody ever did but father, and he never did except of mornings when I wouldn't get up. Then he'd sing out 'Will-yum' with a sort of a horsewhip snap at the end of it. 'William' always reminds me of disturbed slumbers. Call me Billy, and I'll call you Bob. I'll do that anyhow, so you might as well fall into familiar ways. But come, tell me how you are and all about yourself. You haven't written to me since the flood; forgot to receive my last letter I suppose."
"Probably I did. I have been forgetting a good many things. But I hope I have not kept you too long from your breakfast, and especially that I have not made you 'as cross as a twenty dollar bank-note.' Pray tell me what you meant by that figure of speech, will you not? I am curious to know where you got it and why."
"Ha! ha!" laughed Billy. "You'll have a lively time of it if you mean to unravel all my metaphors. Let me see. I must have referred to the big X's they print on the bank bills, or something of that sort. But let's go to breakfast at once. I'm as hungry as a village editor. We can talk over a beefsteak, or you can at least. I mean to be as still as a mill-pond of a cloudy night while you tell me all about yourself."
And over their breakfast they talked. But in telling his story, while he remembered to mention all the details of his situation losing and his situation getting, Mr. Robert somehow forgot to say anything about his other disappointment. He soon learned to know and to like his cousin, and, which was more to the purpose, he began to enjoy him right heartily, in his own way, bantering him on his queer uses of English, half in sport, half in earnest, until the Virginian declared that they had grown as familiar with each other "as a pair of Irishmen at a wake."
"I suppose you're off at once for your new place, a'n't you? This is September," said Billy after his cousin had finished so much of his story as he cared to reveal.
"No," said Robert. "My duties will not begin until January, and meantime I must go off on a tramp somewhere to get my muscles, physical and financial, up again. To tell the truth I have been dawdling at Cape May this summer instead of going off to the mountains or the prairies, as I usually do, for a healthful and economical foot journey, and the result is that my legs and arms are sadly run down. I have been spending too much money too, and so cannot afford to stay around Philadelphia until January. I think I must go off to some of the mountain counties, where the people think five dollars a fortune and call anything less than a precipice rising ground."
"Well, I reckon you won't," said the Virginian; "I've been inviting you to the 'home of your fathers' ever since I was born, and this is the very first time I ever got you to own up to a scrap of leisure as big as your thumb nail. I've got you now with nothing to do and nowhere to go, and I mean to take you with me this very evening to Virginia. We'll leave on the eleven o'clock train to-night, get to Richmond to-morrow at two, and go up home next morning in time for snack."
"But, my dear Billy——"
"But, my dear Bob, I won't hear a word, and I won't take no for an answer. That's poz roz and the king's English. I'm managing this little job. You can give up your rooms to-day, sell out your plunder, and stop expenses. Then you needn't open your pocket-book again for so long that you'll forget how it looks inside. Put a few ninepences into your breeches pocket to throw at darkeys when they hold your horse, and the thing's done. And won't we wake up old Shirley? I tell you it's the delightfulest two hundred year old establishment you ever saw or didn't see. As the Irish attorney said of his ancestral home: 'there isn't a table in the house that
