as I half expected, but answered quite seriously that she had been looking up Tommy, that he was very much attached to Harry, and that she did not think he would teach him anything bad.  He has, I find myself, notions of honor, though they are rather the code of the street.  And he picks up things quickly.  Once he came to tea.  It was amusing to see how he glued his eyes on Harry and kept time with his motions.  He used his fork quite properly, only as Harry is a left-handed little fellow, the right-handed Thomas had the more difficulty.

“He is taking such vast pains with his ‘oration’ that I felt moved to help him.  The subject is ‘The Triumph of Democracy,’ and Tommy civilly explained that ‘democracy’ did not mean the Democratic party, but ’just only a government where all the poor folks can get their rights and can vote.’

“The oration was the kind of spread-eagle thing you might expect; I can see that Tommy has formed himself on the orators of his father’s respectable saloon.  What he said in comment interested me more.  ’Sure, I guess it is the best government, ma’am, though, of course, I got to make it out that way, anyhow.  But we come from Ireland, and there they got the other kind, and me granny, she starved in the famine time, she did that—­with the fever.  Me father walked twenty mile to the Sackville’s place, where they gave him some meal, though he wasn’t one of their tenants; yes, and the lady told him how he would be cooking it.  I never will forget that lady!’

“I saw a dramatic opportunity:  would Tommy be willing to tell that story in his speech?  He looked at me with an odd look—­ or so I imagined it!  ‘Why not?’ says he; ’I’d as soon as not tell it to anyone of them, and why not to them all together?’ Well, why not, when you come to think of it?  So we have got it into the speech; and I, I myself, Sarah, am drilling young Demos-thenes, and he is so apt a scholar that I find myself rather pleasantly employed.”  Having read her letter, Mrs. Carriswood hesitated a second and then added Derry’s information at the bottom of the page.  “I suppose the lordly ancestor was one of King James’s creation—­ see Macaulay, somewhere in the second volume.  I dare say there is a drop or two of good blood in the boy.  He has the manners of a gentleman—­but I don’t know that I ever saw an Irishman, no matter how low in the social scale, who hadn’t.”

Thus it happened that Tommy’s valedictory scored a success that is a tradition of the High School, and came to be printed in both the city papers; copies of which journals Tommy’s mother has preserved sacredly to this day; and I have no doubt, could one find them, they would be found wrapped around a yellow photograph of the “A Class” of 1870:  eight pretty girls in white, smiling among five solemn boys in black, and Tommy himself, as the valedictorian, occupying the centre of the picture in his new suit of broadcloth, with a rose in his buttonhole and his hair cut by a professional barber for the occasion.