"How!" interrupted Mariano. "Do you then estimate the profession of the soldier and sailor so low, that you think only foolish and giddy fellows are fit for it?"
"Not so, child; but it is a school which is eminently fitted to teach respect and obedience to foolish and giddy fellows who are pert to their grandmothers."
"Ah! how unfair," exclaimed Mariano, with assumed solemnity; "I give you good advice, with gravity equal to that of any priest, and yet you call me pert. Grandmother, you are ungrateful as well as unjust. Have I not been good to you all my life?"
"You have, my child," said the little old lady; "very good—also rather troublesome, especially in the way of talking nonsense, and I'm sorry to find that although your goodness continues your troublesomeness does not cease!"
"Well, well," replied the youth, with a sprightly toss of the head, "Lucien and I shall enjoy at least a few weeks more of our old life on the blue sea before he takes to musty books and I to the stool of the clerk. Ah, why did you allow father to give us a good education? How much more enjoyable it would have been to have lived the free life of a fisherman—or of that pig," he said, pointing to one which had just strayed into the garden and lain down to roll in the earth—"what happy ignorance
