“Yes.”

“I was looking for your father, sir. I wished to have a word with him.”

The young man, telling him he is fortunate in his choice of a time, for his father is there, leads the way to the office where he is to be found. “Very like me before I was set up — devilish like me!” thinks the trooper, as he follows. They come to a building in the yard; with an office on an upper floor. At sight of the gentleman in the office, Mr George turns very red.

“What name shall I say to my father?” asks the young man.

George, full of the idea of iron, in desperation answers “Steel,” and is so presented. He is left alone with the gentleman in the office, who sits at a table with account-books before him, and some sheets of paper, blotted with hosts of figures and drawings of cunning shapes. It is a bare office, with bare windows, looking on the iron view below. Tumbled together on the table are some pieces of iron, purposely broken to be tested, at various periods of their service, in various capacities. There is iron-dust on everything; and the smoke is seen, through the windows, rolling heavily out of the tall chimneys, to mingle with the smoke from a vaporous Babylon of other chimneys.

“I am at your service, Mr Steel,” says the gentleman, when his visitor has taken a rusty chair.

“Well, Mr Rouncewell,” George replies, leaning forward, with his left arm on his knee, and his hat in his hand; and very chary of meeting his brother’s eye; “I am not without my expectations, that in the present visit I may prove to be more free than welcome. I have served as a Dragoon in my day; and a comrade of mine that I was once rather partial to, was, if I don’t deceive myself, a brother of yours. I believe you had a brother who gave his family some trouble, and ran away, and never did any good but in keeping away?”

“Are you quite sure,” returns the ironmaster, in an altered voice, “that your name is Steel?”

The trooper falters, and looks at him. His brother starts up, calls him by his name, and grasps him by both hands.

“You are too quick for me!” cries the trooper, with the tears springing out of his eyes. “How do you do, my dear old fellow. I never could have thought you would have been half so glad to see me as all this. How do you do, my dear old fellow, how do you do!”

They shake hands, and embrace each other, over and over again; the trooper still coupling his “How do you do, my dear old fellow!” with his protestation that he never thought his brother would have been half so glad to see him as all this!

“So far from it,” he declares at the end of a full account of what has preceded his arrival there, “I had very little idea of making myself known. I thought if you took by any means forgivingly to my name, I might gradually get myself up to the point of writing a letter. But I should not have been surprised, brother, if you had considered it anything but welcome news to hear of me.”

“We will show you at home what kind of news we think it, George,” returns his brother. “This is a great day at home, and you could not have arrived, you bronzed old soldier, on a better. I make an agreement with my son Watt to-day, that on this day twelve-month he shall marry as pretty and as good a girl as you have seen in all your travels. She goes to Germany to-morrow, with one of your nieces, for a little polishing up in her education. We make a feast of the event, and you will be made the hero of it.”

Mr George is so entirely overcome at first by this prospect, that he resists the proposed honour with great earnestness. Being over-borne, however, by his brother and his nephew& #151; concerning whom he renews his protestations that he never could have thought they would have been half so glad to see