Mr Riley Gives His Advice Concerning a School for Tom

THE gentleman in the ample white cravat and shirt-frill, taking his brandy and water so pleasantly with his good friend Tulliver, is Mr Riley: a gentleman with a waxen complexion and fat hands, rather highly educated for an auctioneer and appraiser, but large-hearted enough to show a great deal of bonhommie towards simple country acquaintances of hospitable habits. Mr Riley spoke of such acquaintances kindly as `people of the old school. The conversation had come to a pause. Mr Tulliver, not without a particular reason, had abstained from a seventh recital of the cool retort by which Riley had shown himself too many for Dix, and how Wakem had had his comb cut for once in his life, now the business of the dam had been settled by arbitration, and how there never would have been any dispute at all about the height of water if everybody was what they should be, and Old Harry hadnt made the lawyers. Mr Tulliver was on the whole a man of safe traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intellect and had arrived at several questionable conclusions, among the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry. Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was rampant Manich?ism, else he might have seen his error. But to-day it was clear that the good principle was triumphant: this affair of the water-power had been a tangled business somehow, for all it seemed - look at it one way - as plain as waters water, but, big a puzzle as it was, it hadnt got the better of Riley. Mr Tulliver took his brandy and water a little stronger than usual, and, for a man who might be supposed to have a few hundreds lying idle at his bankers, was rather incautiously open in expressing his high estimate of his friends business talents.

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