the memories of their youths, declaring how in the old glorious now gone, no congress such as this would have had a chance success. Men had men's work to do then, and were not wont to play the fool, first at one provincial town and then at another, but stuck to their oars and made their fortunes. 'It seems to me, Mr. Furnival,' said Mr. Round, 'that this is all child's play, and to tell the truth I am half ashamed of myself for being here.'
'And you'll look into that matter yourself, Mr. Round?'
'Yes, I will, certainly.'
'I shall take it as a great favour. Of course you will advise your client in accordance with any new facts which may be brought before you; but as I feel certain that no case against young Mason can have any merits, I do hope that you will be able to suggest to Mr. Mason of Groby that the matter should be allowed to rest.' And then Mr. Furnival took his leave, still thinking how far it might be possible that the enemy's side of the question might be supported by real merits. Mr. Round was a good-natured old fellow, and if the case could be inveigled out of his son's hands and into his own, it might be possible that even real merits should avail nothing.
'I confess I am getting rather tired of it,' said Felix Graham that evening to his friend young Staveley, as he stood outside his bedroom door at the top of a narrow flight of stairs in the back part of a large hotel at Birmingham.
'Tired of it! I should think yon are too.'
'But nevertheless I am as sure as ever that good will come from it. I am inclined to think that the same kind of thing must be endured before any improvement is made in anything.'
'That all reformers have to undergo Von Bauhr?'
'Yes, all of them that do any good. Von Bauhr's words were very dry, no doubt.'
'You don't mean to say that you understood them?'
'Not many of them. A few here and there, for the first half-hour, came trembling home to my dull comprehension, and then—'
'You went to sleep.'
'The sounds became too difficult for my cars; but dry and dull and hard as they were, they will not absolutely fall to the ground. He had a meaning in them, and that meaning will reproduce itself in some shape.'
'Heaven forbid that it should ever do so in my presence! All the iniquities of which the English bar may be guilty cannot be so intolerable to humanity as Von Bauhr.'
'Well, good-night, old fellow; your governor is to give us his ideas to-morrow, and perhaps he will be as bad to the Germans as Von Bauhr was to us.'
'Then I can only say that my governor will be very cruel to the Germans.' And so they two went to their dreams.
