Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/46

 cunningly inserted in red, which subtlety lent a singular air of reality to the whole. It was nothing short of sublime!

You may smile, and I have no doubt you do, at my enthusiasm. You may say (what is undeniable) that its cause was nothing more than a sheet of blue paper, upon which a young man in shirt-sleeves, personally unknown to me, had exercised his craft with a ruling-pen. You will be quite right; but I shall retort that a plan’s a plan for a’ that, and that if you have never had the pleasure of gloating over one of your own you are as much to be pitied as the boy who has never filched a watermelon.

Arbuthnot had asked for the prompt return of the plan, with my indorsement, but I kept it by me for a full week before I could bring myself to part with it; and when I realized that the delay was becoming ridiculous, and that I should presently have to let it go, I was in what I conceive to be a father’s state