The rector came back among us with his head high in the air, strutting magnificently on his wizen little legs.

He embraced his daughter in pathetic silence, and gave me his hand with a serene smile of condescension worthy of the greatest humbug (say Louis the Fourteenth) that ever sat on a throne.

When he got the better of his paternal emotion, and began to speak, his voice was so big that I really thought it must have burst him.

The vapor of words in which he enveloped himself (condensed on paper) amounted to these two statements.

First, that he hailed in Oscar (not having, I suppose, children enough already of his own) the advent of another son.