Mr Riley Gives His Advice ing a School for Tom
THE gentleman in the ample white cravat and shirt-frill, taking his brandy and water so pleasantly with his good friend Tulliver, is Mr Riley: a gentleman with a waxen plexion and fat hands, rather highly educated for an aueer and appraiser, but large-hearted enough to show a great deal of bonhommie towards simple try acquaintances of hospitable habits. Mr Riley spoke of such acquaintances kindly as `people of the old school. The versation had e to a pause. Mr Tulliver, not without a particular reason, had abstained from a seventh recital of the cool retort by which Riley had shown himself too many for Dix, and how Wakem had had his b cut for on his life, now the business of the dam had beeled by arbitration, and how there never would have been any dispute at all about the height of water if everybody was what they should be, and Old Harry hadnt made the lawyers. Mr Tulliver was on the whole a man of safe traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intelled had arrived at several questionable clusions, among the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry. Unhappily he had no oo tell him that this was rampant Manich?ism, else he might have seen his error. But to-day it was clear that the good principle was triumphant: this affair of the water-power had been a tangled business somehow, for all it seemed - look at it one way - as plain as waters water, but, big a puzzle as it was, it hadnt got the better of Riley. Mr Tulliver took his brandy and water a little strohan usual, and, for a man who might be supposed to have a few hundreds lying idle at his bankers, was rather incautiously open in expressing his high estimate of his friends busialents.
But the dam was a subject of versation that would keep: it could always be taken up again at the same point aly in the same dition; and there was another subject, as you know, on which Mr Tulliver was in pressing want of Mr Rileys advice. This was his particular reason for remaining silent for a short space after his last draught, and rubbing his knees in a meditative manner. He was not a man to make an abrupt transition. This uzzling world, as he often said, and if you drive ygon in a hurry you may light on an awkward er. Mr Riley, meanwhile, was not impatient. Why should he be? Even Hotspur, one would think, must have been patient in his slippers on a warm hearth, taking copious snuff, and sipping gratuitous brandy and water.
`Theres a thing Ive got i my head, said Mr Tulliver at last, in rather a lower tohan usual, as he turned his head and looked steadfastly at his panion.
`Ah? said Mr Riley, in a tone of mild i. He was a man with heavy waxen eyelids and high-arched eyebrows, lookily the same under all circumstahis immovability of fad the habit of taking a pinch of snuff before he gave an answer, made him trebly oracular to Mr Tulliver.
`Its a very particlar thing, he went on, `its about my boy Tom.
At the sound of this name, Maggie, who was seated on a low stool close by the fire, with a large book open on her lap, shook her heavy hair bad looked up eagerly. There were few sounds that roused Maggie when she was dreaming over her book, but Toms name served as well as the shrillest whistle: in an instant she was och, with gleaming eyes, like a Skye terrier suspeg mischief, or at all events determio fly at any one who threate towards Tom.
`You see,