“You will laugh me out of my misery in spite of myself.”

“I hope so; but I am not sure that a man can be laughed out of a thing he wasn’t laughed into.  Now, Monroe, I am going to surprise you.  I am going to bore you, annoy you; for I am to see you every day for the next week.  Can you bear it?  I shall be worse than the balm of ‘I-told-you-so.’”

Monroe pressed his friend’s hand.

“Come, by all means.  And now we are near my house; go in and take tea with us.”

“No, not to-day.  It is dies nefastus.  Good-bye!”

Twirling his grizzly moustaches and humming to himself, Easelmann turned back.  He did not go to his room, however, but went down a quiet street, apparently guided by instinct, and rang the bell at a well-known door.

“Is Mr. Holworthy at home?”

The servant-girl nodded and smiled, and Easelmann entered.  Mr. Holworthy was emphatically at home, for he was on all-fours, his three children riding cock-horse, with merry shouts, varied by harmless tumbles and laborious clamberings up.  Mr. Holworthy rose with a flushed and happy face, and the children rushed at once to clasp the knees of their familiar old friend.

“We all have to come down at times, I believe,” said Mr. Holworthy, smoothing the few thin hairs on his handsomely arched crown.

“Certainly; a man that can’t be a boy with his children deserves to have none.  Now the reason I am a bachelor is that I feared I could never unbend, being somewhat remarkable for my perpendic”—­

The word was cut off by a sudden movement; the children in their playful struggles had, in fact, thrown him down.  In a moment more they were on his back and he trotting round the room with the grace of an elephant.

“Come, children,” said the father, “that was a rough joke.  Get off, now, and go for your bread and milk.”

Rather reluctantly they obeyed, casting wishful glances backward to the grown-up boy with whom they had hoped to have a frolic.

“Glad to see you,” said Mr. Holworthy.  “You have been unsocial, lately.”

“Yes; all the effect of the panic.  I am such a butterfly that I seem out of place in a work-a-day community.  I am constantly advised, like the volatile person in the fable, to learn wisdom from my aunt; but I can’t, for the soul of me.”

“You ought to visit the more, to cheer the wretched and downcast.”

“Oh, but it’s a fearful waste of magnetism.  Five minutes’ talk with a man who has notes to pay draws all the virtue out of me.  It lowers my vital tone like standing in an ice-house.  You feel such a man from afar like a coming iceberg. You don’t have notes to pay?  I thought not.  I should go at once.”

“No, my little shop pays its way.  I buy for cash.  I pay my hands when they bring in their work, and I have customers enough who ask me for no credit.”

“Happy man! most fortunate of tailors!—­I have been thinking, Holworthy, among your many benevolent projects, why you never devised some means of relieving people who are supposed to be in good circumstances,—­a society for ameliorating the condition of the rich.”