which he considered more congenial and intellectual than that of grinding flour.  Strange to say, although he knew less than any of his colleagues, he succeeded better than any of them.  He managed to impress a sense of his own importance upon everybody, including the headmaster.  He slid into a position of superiority. above three or four colleagues who would have shamed him at an examination, and who uttered many a curse because they saw themselves surpassed and put in the shade by a stranger, who, they were confident, could hardly construct a hexameter.  He never quarrelled with them nor did he grossly patronise them, but he always let them know that he considered himself above them.  His reading was desultory; in fact, everything he did was desultory.  He was not selfish in the ordinary sense of the word.  Rather was he distinguished by a large and liberal open-handedness; but he was liberal also to himself to a remarkable degree, dressing himself expensively, and spending a good deal of money in luxuries.  He was specially fond of insisting on his half French origin, made a great deal of his mother, was silent as to his father, and always signed himself C. Leroy Butts, although I don’t believe the second Christian name was given him in baptism.  Notwithstanding his generosity he was egotistical and hollow at heart.  He knew nothing of friendship in the best sense of the word, but had a multitude of acquaintances, whom he invariably sought amongst those who were better off than himself.  He was popular with them, for no man knew better than he how to get up an entertainment, or to make a success of an evening party.  He had not been at his school for two years before he conceived the notion of setting up for himself.  He had not a penny, but he borrowed easily what was wanted from somebody he knew, and in a twelvemonth more he had a dozen pupils.  He took care to get the ablest subordinates he could find, and he succeeded in passing a boy for an open scholarship at Oxford, against two competitors prepared by the very man whom he had formerly served.  After this he prospered greatly, and would have prospered still more, if his love of show and extravagance had not increased with his income.  His talents were sometimes taxed when people who came to place their sons with him supposed ignorantly that his origin and attainments were what might be expected from his position; and poor Chalmers, a Glasgow M.A., who still taught, for 80 pounds a year, the third class in the establishment in which Butts began life, had some bitter stories on that subject.  Chalmers was a perfect scholar, but he was not agreeable.  He had black finger-nails, and wore dirty collars.  Having a lively remembrance of his friend’s “general acquaintance” with Latin prosody, Chalmers’ opinion of Providence was much modified when he discovered what Providence was doing for Butts.  Clem took to the Church when he started for himself.  It would have been madness in him to remain a Dissenter.