Fourthly, a skip is supposed to be born a valet, as some are born poets,--to have an instinctive aptitude for all the details of things he has never seen or heard of before; so that when he applies Warren's patent to French leather boots, polishes silver with a Bath brick, blows the fire with a quarto, and cuts candles with a razor, he finds it passing strange that he should be "had up" for punishment. To be fat without food, to be warm without fire, to be wakeful without sleep, to be clad without clothes, to be known as a vagabond, and to pass current for unblemished honesty, to be praised as a liar, and then thrashed for lying,--is too much to expect at fifteen years of age. Lastly, as to Betty's I had no regrets. The occupation of horse-boy, like the profession of physic, has no "avenir." The utmost the most aspiring can promise to himself is to hold more horses than his neighbors, as the Doctor's success is to order more "senna." There is nothing beyond these; no higher path opens to him who feels the necessity for an "upward course." It is a ladder with but one round to it! No, no; I was right to "sell out" there. My steeplechase might have led to something,--that is, I might have become a jockey; but then, again, one's light weight, like a "contralto" voice, is sure to vanish after a year or two; and then, from the heyday of popularity, you sink down into a bad groom or a fourth-rate tenor, just as if, after reaching a silk gown at the bar, a man had to begin life again as crier in the Exchequer! Besides, in all these various walks I should have had the worst of all "trammels," a patron. Now, if any resolve had thoroughly fixed itself in my mind, it was this: never to have a patron, never to be bound to any man who, because he had once set you on your legs, should regulate the pace you were to walk through a long life. To do this, one should be born without a particle of manhood's spirit,--absolutely without volition; otherwise you go through life a living lie, talking sentiments that are not yours, and wearing a livery in your heart as well as on your back!