"Nevertheless, it is not agreeable to me, Mr.
Smear."

"And may I ask in what respect you conceive
it to have failed?" asked the humbled preceptor.

"Your window," replied this extraordinary
youth, "is too light. It is so bright, indeed, that
I am unable to see anything else in the
picture."

But here our artist felt so strong in his theory,
that he actually made an attempt to defend
himself. "Allow me," he urged, with the utmost
politeness, "to suggest that this defect—in itself,
doubtless, sufficiently to be deplored—is, granting
the introduction of the window, quite
inevitable. From that window the light falls upon
all the different objects in the apartment, which
all must necessarily, therefore, be darker than it."

"Must they, Mr. Smear," inquired the pupil;
"and why?"

"Because," replied the other, with a certain
air of conscious pride—"because the thing lighted
cannot be brighter than that which lights it—
because the cause that a thing exists must be
stronger than the thing which exists by it."

'"Because the cause that a thing exists must
be stronger than the thing that exists by it,"'
repeated C. J., very slowly. He repeated the
sentence to himself once or twice, and then, with
leisurely steps, departed from the room.

"Oh, my goodness!" exclaimed the tutor to
himself, when left alone, "what have I said? Is
it true, I wonder? Yes," he added, presently, in
a valiant tone, and repeating the sentence to
himself. "It is true. It is rather queerly put;
but it is true, and I'll stand by it to the last."

In less than a week, this time—in five days, if
the reader can believe it—the theory of our
learned man was brought once more on the tapis
by his pupil.

Our young friend, for some time before speaking,
had been observed by his tutor, who feared
there was miching mallecho, to look repeatedly
into the garden. At length the right moment
for speaking seemed to have arrived.

"Mr. Smear," he said, "do you see old Adams
there, the gardener, and his son, the under-
gardener?"

"Undoubtedly I do," was the reply.

"And do you observe," continued our youthful
casuist, "how small and short and shrivelled
the father is, and how tall and broad and strong
the son is?"

The tutor felt, without knowing why, that he
was getting on some dangerous ground, but he
admitted these things to be so.

"And yet, Mr. Smear, you urged the other
day that the cause that a thing exists must be
stronger than the thing which exists by it, when
here is old Adams, who, as being his father, is
the cause that young Adams exists, not
comparable in strength or in any other respect to
his own son."

Inconceivable and matchless sophistry. Here
was the unhappy tutor made, as it, were, to eat
his own words, and that he might do so the more
easily, here was his theory made mincemeat
of, for convenience of swallowing. And the
worst of it was, that all the time the Reverend
Christopher felt that this reasoning of his
pupil's was entirely false—at any rate, in so far
as it bore upon his theory of light—and yet, for
the life of him, he could not prove it to be so.
To do him justice, he went at it like a lion. He
cudgelled his brains. He wrote short essays on
the subject in the dead of night, and even sent
off letters to certain old friends at the University
asking their opinions. But it was all to no
purpose. The more he considered, the greater
became his confusion. His friends wrote to him
that it was a mere sophism, a thing that any
schoolboy could refute—they didn't do it
themselves, by-the-by—and that his own theory of
light was entirely correct. There was one of
Mr. Smear's correspondents, a head of a house,
and a personage with a high reputation for
wisdom, who told him that he should have
confined himself to this same theory of light, and
not have added the clause about the superior
strength of the cause to the effect, and Smear
did feel that, perhaps, it would have been better
if he had done so; but it was all useless now, so
he fretted himself into a loss of flesh and a great
pallor of countenance, and then, to put a period
to his doubts, he got up one fine morning, and,
seizing his palette and brushes, toned down the
window to such an extent as could in no way be
accounted for, except, indeed, by the following
addition, which he hastened to make, to the title
of his picture: "An Eclipse of the Sun (total) is
supposed to be going on outside."

Such was the result of this, the third instance
of extraordinary readiness on the part of the
subject of this memoir.

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