I might have guessed that only a couple of idle boys like yourselves, knowing no better, would have pushed their way to a spot that all worthy dwellers in Bosekop, and all true followers of the Lutheran devilry, avoid as though the plague were settled in it." And the old man laughed, a splendid, mellow laugh, with the ring of true jollity in it,--a laugh that was infectious, for Errington and Lorimer joined in it heartily without precisely knowing why.

Lorimer, however, thought it seemly to protest against the appellation "idle boys." "What do you take us for, sir ?" he said with lazy good-nature.

"I carry upon my shoulders the sorrowful burden of twenty-six years,--Philip, there, is painfully conscious of being thirty,--may we not therefore dispute the word 'boys' as being derogatory to our dignity?
You called us 'men' a while ago,--remember that!" Olaf Gueldmar laughed again.

His suspicious gravity had entirely disappeared, leaving his face a beaming mirror of beneficence and good-humor.
"So you _are_ men," he said cheerily, "men in the bud, like leaves on a tree.

But you seem boys to a tough old stump of humanity such as I am.
That is my way,--my child Thelma, though they tell me she is a woman grown, is always a babe to me.