Through some law unknown to science, all dishes seemed to gravitate toward the main center of Dicky's trencher, thereby leaving the rest of the table comparatively bare. For eighteen months Master Shelton had given Mrs. Ponsonby the advantage of his company; not so much through volition-albeit, he was well enough pleased with his quarters-as through submission to paternal authority.

Conventional ideas are apt to wilt under the blight of poverty, and to revive under the fuller harvesting of this world's goods, and Mr. Shelton, Sr., who had, in the days of his leanness, let Polly run wild with all the college boys of Harmouth, became suddenly particular, as his bank account fattened, in regard to the niceties of conduct in his daughters.