'It is true that the lease and stock of Ash Farm are to be sold--at a price. You, I believe, are in want of such a concern for the young couple, just married.' 'Well, I don't say I might not be a customer, if the price were reasonable.' 'Let us step into a private room, then,' said Dutton rising. 'This is not a place for business of that kind. Sharp,' he added, _sotto voce_, 'come with us; I may want you.' I had listened to all this with a kind of stupid wonderment, and I now, mechanically as it were, got up and accompanied the party to another room. The matter was soon settled. Five hundred pounds for the lease--ten years unexpired--of Ash Farm, about eleven hundred acres, and the stock, implements; the ploughing, sowing, &c. already performed, to be paid for at a valuation based on present prices. I drew out the agreement in form, it was signed in duplicate, a large sum was paid down as deposit, and Mr Hurst with his friend withdrew. 'Well,' I said, taking a glass of port from a bottle Dutton had just ordered in--'here's fortune in your new career; but as I am a living man, I can't understand what you can be thinking about.' 'You haven't read the newspapers?' 'O yes, I have! Victory! Glory! March to Paris! and all that sort of thing. Very fine, I daresay; but rubbish, moonshine, I call it, if purchased by the abandonment of the useful, comfortable, joyous life of a prosperous yeoman.' 'Is that all you have seen in the papers?' 'Not much else. What, besides, have you found in them?' 'Wheat, at ten or eleven pounds a load--less perhaps--other produce in proportion.' 'Ha!' 'I see further, Sharp, than you bookmen do, in some matters. Boney's done for; that to me is quite plain, and earlier than I thought likely; although I, of course, as well as every other man with a head instead of a turnip on his shoulders, knew such a raw-head-and-bloody-bones as that must sooner or later come to the dogs. And as I also know what agricultural prices were _before_ the war, I can calculate without the aid of vulgar fractions, which, by the by, I never reached, what they'll be when it's over, and the thundering expenditure now going on is stopped. In two or three weeks, people generally will get a dim notion of all this; and I sell, therefore, whilst I can, at top prices.' The shrewdness of the calculation struck me at once. 'You will take another farm when one can be had on easier terms than now, I suppose?'