“Eh! Yes, I believe I’ve picked up a thing or two,” returned Hazlehurst modestly; “I’ve found out the great secret of life; the next move is to make the knowledge pay, and that’s not so easy.” “I didn’t know there was a great secret to find out,” observed Coverdale, stroking his curly black whiskers, “the rule of life seems easy enough to me--make up your mind what you want to do, and then quietly do it--that’s my recipe.” “A very good one for you, my dear fellow, you’ve only to put your hand in your pocket, and, as your money rattles, difficulties disappear; but we’re not all born to £5000 a-year, worse luck; fathers have flinty hearts, and even the amenities of the nineteenth century have failed to macadamise them--‘I’ve given you an expensive education, sir, and I expect to see you turn it to account.’ That’s about the style of blessing we inherit now-a-day; however, my secret of life is this: everything has a culminating point, and the dodge is to hit upon it yourself, and bring others to it, with the least delay possible; in these four words--come to the point, is embodied the whole philosophy of existence.” “Well, yes, I dare say there is something in it,” returned Coverdale, meditatively, “it never exactly struck me before, but there’s a beautiful simplicity about it that I rather admire--a little too railroadish, perhaps, unless a man’s in an awful hurry; you lose the bright sunny peeps and the jolly old road-side alehouses of life, by rushing so straight to your object.” “Sunny nonsenses,” was the uncourteous rejoinder--“none of your old slow-coaching days for me; life’s not long enough for dreaming--Parr’s life pills are a swindle, and Methusaleh died without leaving his recipe behind him;--so come to the point say I.” “Though I won’t promise to adopt your philosophy for a permanency, I’ll act upon it for once, at all events,” replied Coverdale, smiling (and a nice, genial, pleasant smile it was too, showing a white, even row of teeth, and lighting up a pair of large, dark, intelligent eyes, and making the “smiler” look particularly handsome). “So to come to the point, I’m here to enlist you in my service for what the women call a ‘day’s shopping’ to-morrow: I’ve no clothes to my back, no horses to ride, no dog-cart to knock about in--in fact, none of the necessaries of life;--then, having benefited by your advice and experience, I mean to carry you off to Coverdale for a crack at the rabbits; thank goodness! they’ve got the game up and the poachers down, since I’ve been abroad: that was the only thing I made a row about when I came into the property. Why, there are no preserves like the Coverdale woods in the county, and yet my poor uncle never had a pheasant on his table. Things are rather different now, my boy, and my only real sorrow at the present moment is, that there are two whole months to be got rid of before the first of September: well! what do you say to my proposal?”