Mr. Barmby, senior, whose years drew nigh to three-score, had a great advantage in point of physical health over his old friend Stephen Lord, and his mind enjoyed a placidity which promised him length of days.  Since the age of seventeen he had plied a pen in the office of a Life Assurance Company, where his salary, by small and slow increments, had grown at length to two hundred and fifty a year.  Himself a small and slow person, he had every reason to be satisfied with this progress, and hoped for no further advance.  He was of eminently sober mind, profoundly conscientious, and quite devoid of social ambition,—­points of character which explained the long intimacy between him and Stephen Lord.  Yet one habit he possessed which foreshadowed the intellectual composition of his son,—­he loved to write letters to the newspapers.  At very long intervals one of these communications achieved the honour of type, and then Mr Barmby was radiant with modest self-approval.  He never signed such letters with his own name, but chose a pseudonym befitting the subject.  Thus, if moved to civic indignation by pieces of orange-peel on the pavement, he styled himself ‘Urban Rambler;’ if anxious to protest against the overcrowding of ’bus or railway-carriage, his signature was ‘Otium cum Dignitate.’  When he took a holiday at the seaside, unwonted leisure and novel circumstances prompted him to address local editors at considerable length.  The preservation of decency by bathers was then his favourite topic, and he would sign ‘Pudor,’ or perchance ‘Paterfamilias.’  His public epistles, if collected, would have made an entertaining and lnstructive volume, so admirably did they represent one phase of the popular mind.  ’No, sir,’—­this sentence frequently occurred,—­’it was not thus that our fathers achieved national and civic greatness.’  And again:  ’All the feelings of an English parent revolt,’ &c.  Or:  ’And now, sir, where is this to end?’—­a phrase applied at one moment to the prospects of religion and morality, at another to the multiplication of muffin-bells.

On a Sunday afternoon, Mr. Barmby often read aloud to his daughters, and in general his chosen book was ‘Paradise Lost.’  These performances had an indescribable solemnity, but it unfortunately happened that, as his fervour increased, the reader became regardless of aspirates.  Thus, at the culmination of Satanic impiety, he would give forth with shaking voice—­

’Ail, orrors, ail! and thou profoundest Ell, Receive thy new possessor!’

This, though it did not distress the girls, was painful to Samuel Bennett, who had given no little care to the correction of similar lapses in his own speech.