The matter was soon settled. Five hundred pounds for the lease--ten years unexpired--of Ash Farm, about eleven hundred acres, and the stock and implements; the plowing, 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 dare say; 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 farther, 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, while 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?" "Yes; if I can manage it. And I _will_ manage it. Between ourselves, after all the old man's debts are paid, I shall only have about nine or ten hundred pounds to the good, even by selling at the present tremendous rates; so it was time, you see, I pulled up, and rubbed the fog out of my eyes a bit. And hark ye, Master Sharp!" he added, as we rose and shook hands with each other--"I have now done _playing_ with the world--it's a place of work and business; and I'll do my share of it so effectually, that my children, if I have any, shall, if I do not, reach the class of landed gentry; and this you'll find, for all your sneering, will come about all the more easily that neither they nor their father will be encumbered with much educational lumber. Good-by."