CHAPTER XII

THE SPENS SPLINT

FEW things are more difficult in life than getting into a passion with propriety. Propriety presupposes a certain amount of reflection in the person who affects it, and the essence of passion is explosion. Sir Thomas Spens, when crossed, irritated, and roused, was nothing if not an explosive force. It was not good for anybody to be near him when he was thus affected, and Haco felt that one day, after the summer session came to an end and he had returned to Binkie.

The end of the Session brought nothing new to Haco. He had stood fairly well in his classesthat is, he was on the lists, though low down, while Sandy got both the medals. But he was otherwise provoking to his father, for it had been coming out week after week, that he had contracted large debts.

At first Sir Thomas said nothing about them. When a tailor sent in a large bill, he paid it without comment; Haco, at the time, being at Christie's in Forfarshire. Then a manufacturer of philosophical instruments sent in a bill for a microscope and endless specimens, and for other articles in steel and brass remotely connected with the summer studies.

To these he said 'Pshaw!' as he paid them.

Presently in came a collection of bills from book

sellers; five of them, one after another, each bigger than its neighbour.

'Pshaw! pshaw!' said Sir Thomas on that

occasion.

Accounts came in from a furnishing decorator, and a dealer in articles of vertu, from a dealer in marine stores, and a manufacturer of compasses, from a hatter, and a fruiterer, a jeweller, and a stationer.

Pshaw pshaw pshaw! This is too much of a good thing!' said the baronet, rising from the perusal of the bills, and witnessing the shedding of cheques like leaves in Vallombrosa. Too much of a good thing! Why, the lad has been living at the rate of six hundred pounds a-year! - six positive, individual hundred pounds a-year! He seems to have been buying everything that his eye saw. Haco! Haco!'

At the time, Haco was in the garden. He was finding it rather lonely. Sandy had not come over for holidays; he was taking his holidays with a

pupil who was travelling in the Highlands, and who kept up some of his summer studies.

Isaac! Isaac !' shouted the baronet, when his son did not respond to his summons.

Isaac put in an alarmed head. He knew that Sir Thomas had some preparations of the tail ends of the nerve at the back of the eyeball of a mole, on glass slides, about which he was acutely anxious. He hoped nothing had occurred to them like the tumbling of the bottle of nitric acid one day over the same nerves in the back of the eyeball of a bat, which Sir Thomas declared had cost him the labour of years.

'The labour of years, you reckless, heedless, misguided fool of sixty!' cried the baronet, looking at the ruined filaments on the slides and at the open mouth of his henchman.

'It was an accident, Sir Thomas,' said Isaac. 'I didn't observe there was a stopper in the bottle, and that it contained nitric acid. Now, the con

tents of any other bottle would have passed over the surface of the slide harmless. I'm regretful that our experiment should have come to such an untimely conclusion. But there are plenty more bats hanging by their feet under the branches o' the trees. I can get ye a dizzen any nicht. An' I do not like to be reminded o' my years in that passionate manner, Sir Thomas Spens.'

Grief closed the baronet's mouth on that occasion, and he waved his servant from the room. On the present occasion, however, he kept on,

'Isaac Isaac bring my son here, will you?'

And Isaac, hastening into the garden, searched for Haco, and warned him that he was afraid his father had something disagreeable to say to him.

'Disagreeable!' said Haco, abandoning a book and rising from a sheltered arbour. What is that

for, Isaac? What have I been doing?'

'I couldn't really say, sir; but there are letters on the table, and the cheque-book's out. He's been