“Yes, I did,” answered Nicholas, “and I liked it much; it just suited me. I hardly ever attended a lecture; and I kept three very clever hunters in full work—but it was too happy a state to last. The old Dean of Christchurch, when I had been there little more than a year, gave me a hint which I might not misinterpret, that I had better see the world; and my father made me travel through Scotland and Ireland, which was all the world Buonaparte would let a man see in those days, unless he turned soldier and went to Spain. This was dull work, though every now and then I got some good fishing, and once or twice some capital grouse-shooting; so I returned home as quickly as I could, and have been living with my father here at the Plashetts (for that’s the name of our place) ever since. I have four as nice hunters as you ever saw, and get plenty of shooting and trout-fishing, without going a yard off his manors; so I make it out pretty well. If it happens any day that I neither hunt, fish, nor shoot, I trot over to Fisherton to see what fish there is in the market.” Warenne smiled at the complacency with which Nicholas reviewed his useless life. “Are you not a magistrate?” inquired he. “No,” replied his friend, “they wished to make me one, but I have refused myself to every application on the subject. There is no fun in being interrupted at all hours of the day by a pack of greasy fellows, making complaints against each other for assaults in their drunken squabbles overnight; nor in being condemned to sit from eleven o’clock to six one day in every week, to hear the idle blackguards of the neighbouring parishes abuse their overseers. No, thank you, said I, I am not going to be one of your ‘glorious unpaid,’ with the press firing into me for every little mistake I might make, and never giving me credit for the sacrifice of my time and comfort; I know better.” By this time the character of the road had undergone some change. The hedges had disappeared, and instead of the narrow trough, if I may so term it, in which they had been travelling, wherein their view was limited to the hot sun and clear sky above them, they had now, on either side, a broad strip of waste land, beyond which to the north lay a large extent of wild low brushwood; while to the south there were some newly inclosed fields. Presently all signs of arable cultivation ceased, and they came out on a wide common. Just at this point the road bent rather more to the southward, and the line of brushwood going off from it nearly at right angles and then sweeping round to the east, till it joined some large trees, formed a sort of boundary to the waste.