THE ADULT TREE. 99 
CHAPTER III. 
THE ADULT TREE. 
WHEN a writer on fiction, taking up his tale, 
as we have done, from the birth of the hero or 
heroine, as the case may be, has exhausted all he 
has to tell about the infancy and childhood of 
these personages, he is very often obliged to have 
recourse to a little artifice in order to get over 
the years between youth and manhood; and he 
generally tells us at the beginning of perhaps 
his third chapter, that we must be so kind 
as to suppose that a certain number of years 
have slipped by between the close of the second 
and commencement of the third chapters of 
his book. We see no more convenient way 
of getting out of the same difficulty; and we 
must therefore beg the reader to be equally 
indulgent to our history, which has the advan- 
