Thus a disposition, naturally vehement and passionate, had been rendered irritable and reckless, and a character self-willed and perverse had become obstinate and disobedient. Dispute after dispute arose between father and son after the spoilt boy became the daring and violent youth, till at length Mr. Wittingham, for the threefold purpose of putting him under some sort of discipline, of removing him from bad associates, and giving him the tone of a gentleman, had sent him to Oxford. One year had passed over well enough, but at the commencement of the second year, Mr. Wittingham found that his notions of proper economy were very different from his son's, and that Oxford was not likely to reconcile the difference. He heard of him horse-racing, driving stagecoaches, betting on pugilists, gambling, drinking, getting deeper and deeper in debt; and his letters of remonstrance were either not answered at all, or answered with contempt. A time had come, however, when the absolute necessity of recruiting his finances from his father's purse had reduced the youth to promises of amendment and a feigned repentance; and just at the time our tale opens, the worthy magistrate was rocking himself in the cradle of delusive expectations, and laying out many a plan for the future life of his reformed son, when suddenly as we have seen, he found him standing talking to the housekeeper in his own hall with the marks of a recent scuffle very visible on his face. The consternation of Mr. Wittingham was terrible; for though by no means a man of ready combinations in any other matter than pounds, shillings and pence, his fancy was not so slow a beast as to fail in joining together the description which Ned Hayward had given of the marks he had set upon one of the worthy gentlemen who had been found attacking Mrs. Clifford's carriage, and the cuts and bruises upon the fair face of his gentle offspring. He had also various private reasons of his own for supposing that such an enterprise as that which had been interrupted in Tarningham-lane, as the place was called, might very well come within the sphere of his son's energies, and for a moment he gave himself up to a sort of apathetic despair, seeing all his fond hopes of rustic rule and provincial importance dashed to the ground by the conduct of his own child.