Two reasons for not regretting it were adduced by my father; firstly, that it taught me not to despise the importance of possessing money; secondly, that we had served our country by assisting Dykes, who was on the scent of a new and terrible weapon of destruction, which he believed to be in the hands of the French Government.  Major Dykes disappeared on the scent, but we had the satisfaction of knowing that we had done our best toward saving the Navy of Great Britain from being blown out of water.  Temple and I laughed over Major Dykes, and he became our puppet for by-play, on account of his enormous whiskers, his passion for strong drinks, and his air of secresy.  My father’s faith in his patriotic devotedness was sufficient to withhold me from suspicions of his character.  Whenever my instinct, or common sense, would have led me to differ with my father in opinion fun supervened; I was willing that everything in the world should be as he would have it be, and took up with a spirit of laughter, too happy in having won him, in having fished him out of the deep sea at one fling of the net, as he said, to care for accuracy of sentiment in any other particular.

Our purse was at its lowest ebb; he suggested no means of replenishing it, and I thought of none.  He had heard that it was possible to live in Paris upon next to nothing with very great luxury, so we tried it; we strolled through the lilac aisles among bonnes and babies, attended military spectacles, rode on omnibuses, dined on the country heights, went to theatres, and had a most pleasurable time, gaining everywhere front places, friendly smiles, kind little services, in a way that would have been incomprehensible to me but for my consciousness of the magical influence of my father’s address, a mixture of the ceremonious and the affable such as the people could not withstand.

‘The poet is perhaps, on the whole, more exhilarating than the alderman,’ he said.

These were the respective names given by him to the empty purse and the full purse.  We vowed we preferred the poet.

‘Ay,’ said he, ’but for all that the alderman is lighter on his feet:  I back him to be across the Channel first.  The object of my instructions to you will be lost, Richie, if I find you despising the Alderman’s Pegasus.  On money you mount.  We are literally chained here, you know, there is no doubt about it; and we are adding a nail to our fetters daily.  True, you are accomplishing the Parisian accent.  Paris has also this immense advantage over all other cities:  ’tis the central hotel on the high-road of civilization.  In Paris you meet your friends to a certainty; it catches them every one in turn; so now we must abroad early and late, and cut for trumps.’  A meeting with a friend of my father, Mr. Monterez Williams, was the result of our resolute adoption of this system.  He helped us on to Boulogne, where my father met another friend, to whom he gave so sumptuous a dinner that we had not money enough to pay the hotel bill.