gentlemen may not slide down gracefully into the real thing. We are of age and can do what we like, but we have also persuaded the uncles and aunts into giving their consent to our taking this farm and investing our princely capital in it. We have got a good bailiff to put us up to the wrinkles, and we mean to go the whole hog.’ ‘You haven’t asked my advice,’ said Oliver, ‘but I am afraid it won’t answer—this won’t answer, Stanhope.’ ‘Now, look here, Constable,’ argued the sanguine advocate, ‘you think we are going in for being gentlemen farmers, and so will fall between stools, but it is nothing of the kind. Didn’t I say we were going the whole hog? Whatever that appropriate phrase may mean, we are to learn to do everything for ourselves, just as we should have done in Queensland or Natal. It is not the season for holding a plough, else I should have tried it to-morrow. But we are in time for the first crop of hay, and we are to help at the harvest. Won’t it be jolly fun, like a page out of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” which somebody gave me to read when I had scarlet fever at school a century ago—only I am afraid the Miss Primroses are still more out-of-date, and will not show among the haycocks next week. We thought of doing without a woman-servant, and making our own beds and cooking our own grub. But since old Horry is not as strong as a horse like me, we judged it better to change our coats by degrees.’ ‘You were right there,’ said Oliver, asking himself whether Harry Stanhope were a greater young fool than he, Oliver, had ever taken the trouble to rate the lad—the most thorough-going donkey Oliver had encountered—whether Harry were in earnest or simply talking bosh, knowing it to be bosh all the time? And if there should turn out to be some foundation for what Stanhope was telling him, as, after all, Oliver had no reason to question, here was a fine complication of the difficulties of his position in these fellows establishing themselves on the next farm to him, with the deliberate intention, however wildly carried out, of exiling themselves from their own class and naturalising themselves in Oliver’s! He did not for a moment entertain the idea that the Stanhopes would aid him in his aims. The young men would simply import their own faults and follies into a sphere in which the brothers had neither part nor lot, while they would assuredly ruin themselves in a pecuniary sense.