There are practical difficulties in the way of the adoption of such methods at home.  We must be content to envy, without imitating, these free and happy sons of the hills.  And yet a few of the old school are left us still:  averse from change, mistrustful of progress, sticking steadily to the good old-fashioned dagger and bowl.  I had a friend who disposed of a relative every spring.  Uncles were his special line —­ (he had suffered much from their tribe, having been early left an orphan) —­ though he had dabbled in aunts, and in his hot youth, when he was getting his hand in, he had even dallied with a grand-parent or two.  But it was in uncles he excelled.  He possessed (at the beginning of his career) a large number of these connections, and pursuit of them, from the mere sordid point of view of £ s. d., proved lucrative.  But he always protested (and I believed him) that gain with him was a secondary consideration.  It would hardly be in the public interest to disclose his modus operandi.  I shall only remark that he was one of the first to realise the security and immunity afforded the artist by the conditions of modern London.  Hence it happened that he usually practised in town, but spent his vacations at the country houses of such relations as were still spared him, where he was always the life and soul of the place.  Unfortunately he is no longer with us, to assist in the revision of this article:  nor was it permitted me to soothe his last moments.  The presiding Sheriff was one of those new-fangled officials who insist on the exclusion of the public, and he declined to admit me either in the capacity of a personal connection or, though I tried my hardest, as the representative of ``The National Observer.’’ It only remains to be said of my much-tried and still lamented friend, that he left few relatives to mourn his untimely end.

But our reluctant feet must needs keep step with the imperious march of Time, and my poor friend’s Art (as himself in later years would sorrowfully admit) is now almost as extinct as the glass-staining of old, or ``Robbia’s craft so apt and strange’’; while our thin-blooded youth, too nice for the joyous old methods, are content to find sweetest revenge in severely dropping their relations.  This is indeed a most effective position:  it exasperates, while it is unassailable.  And yet there remains a higher course, a nobler task.  Not mere forgiveness:  it is simple duty to forgive —­ even one’s guardians.  No young man of earnest aspirations will be content to stop there.  Nay:  lead them on, these lost ones, by the hand; conduct them ``generously and gently, and with linking of the arm’’; educate them, eradicate their false ideals, dispel their foolish prejudices; be to their faults a little blind and to their virtues very kind:  in fine, realise that you have a mission —­ that these wretches are not here for nothing.  The task will seem hard at first; but only those who have tried can know how much may be done by assiduous and kindly effort towards the chastening —­ ay! the final redemption even! —­ of the most hopeless and pig-headed of uncles.