PATERNAL DISCIPLINE "The Fair, Free, and Frisky"-- as they called themselves, were not of a violent order at all, neither treasonable, nor even disloyal.

Their Club, if it deserved the name, had not been of political, social, or even convivial intention, but had lapsed unawares into all three uses, and most of all that last mentioned.

The harder the times are, the more confidential (and therefore convivial) do Englishmen become; and if Free-trade survives with us for another decade, it will be the death of total abstinence.

But now they had bad times, without Free-trade--that Goddess being still in the goose-egg--and when two friends met, without a river between them, they were bound to drink one another's health, and did it, without the unstable and cold-blooded element.

The sense of this duty was paramount among the "Free and Frisky," and without it their final cause would have vanished long ago, and therewith their formal one.
None of the old-established folk of the blue blood of Springhaven, such as the Tugwells, the Shankses, the Praters, the Bowleses, the Stickfasts, the Blocks, or the Kedgers, would have anything to do with this Association, which had formed itself among them, like an anti-corn-law league, for the destruction of their rights and properties.