A MOMENTOUS COMMUNICATION 313 tives—emigrate, enlist, or hang yourself. Of course you can sponge on your friends for a year or two if you are mean enough to do so, but there is an end to that sort of thing in time. May I ask why you put the question, Hilliard? You have really a splendid opening here ; you are surely not going to be foolish enough to chuck it, with the idea of returning to England and taking anything that may turn up ? ” “No, I am not so foolish as that. I have had, as you say, luck—extraordinary luck, and I have quite made up my mind to stay in the service. No, I am really asking you because I know so little of England that I wondered how men who had a fair education but no family interest did get on.”

“ They very rarely do get on,” the other said. “ Of course if they are inventive geniuses they may discover something an engine, for example, that will do twice the work with half the consumption of fuel that any other engine will do; or, if chemically inclined, they may discover something that will revolutionize dyeing, for example: but not one man in a thousand is a genius, and as a rule the man you are speaking of, the ordinary public-school and Varsity man, if he has no interest and is not bent upon entering the army, even as a private, emigrates if he. hasn’t sufficient income to live upon at home.”

“ Thank you ! I had no idea it was so difficult to make a living in England, or to obtain employment, for a welleducated man of two- or three-and-twenty.”

“ My dear Hilliard, that is the problem that is exercising the minds of the whole of the middle class of England with sons growing up. Of course men of business can take their sons into their own offices and train them to their own profession ; but after all, if a man has four or five sons he cannot take them all into his office with a view to partnership. He may take one, but the others have to make their own way somehow.”

They chatted now upon the war, the dates upon which the various regiments would go down, and the chance of the