"Not much, Linklater. Poaching has been rampant for years. There's no such system of fat and comfortable preserving as you have here; and then the heavy rains kill off the young birds, all but the strongest." "Ah! that's bad, that's bad. Any blackcock?" "The mountains simply swarm with every kind of game, from deer to snipe. But nothing's been taken care of. My place has been derelict for years. I'll put in a couple of keepers, and next year you must come and judge for yourself, if God spares us all." "Why shouldn't He?" said the publisher hastily. "Ah! Linklater, you're a young man still, while I've turned sixty. And life is uncertain to the youngest of us." "So it is, so it is!" said the publisher, as if the question had no interest for him. "I hear you've good trout rivers over there." "The best in Europe," said the General heartily. "My cook will send you up a salmon-trout if you'll come over next May or June--off your own rod, too--that you'll never forget as long as you live." "You were always a lucky dog!" said the publisher enviously. "I suppose there's no man alive hates the smell of printer's ink more than I do, and yet here I am, condemned to it all my life, while you've been living the life of a man, fighting half the time, and now sitting down to enjoy your elder years in a half-wild country flowing with milk and honey." "You are shocking this child, Linklater," said the General, and indeed I had heard him in amazement. "Miss Brandon thinks Paternoster Row the centre of the universe." The publisher looked at me kindly. "So did I when I was her age, or I shouldn't be where I am now." "Hear him!" said the General. "Who would think the man was one of the finest scholars alive?" "Grubbing among the bones of dead men." "My lad told me that when he was at Oxford you were still remembered as the Bodleian Bookworm." "I had less complimentary names than that. I was an idle dog in those days, or at least learnt nothing that could bring me honours. I read at my own sweet will, and came out badly in the Schools, though better than I deserved. I was really the idlest man of my time, except Fennings of New, who lay all day in a hammock with a pack of cards, and played the right hand against the left when he could no longer get anyone to play with him. He afterwards became a great colonial administrator,--" "And you a scholar, whose scholarship altogether overshadows you as a publisher." "Well, well, I ought to have been a farmer, and tramped the furrows all day in muddy boots. Books are not living." "You're an ungrateful fellow!" said the General. "If you were one of the failures, now?" "Ah!" said the publisher; "everyone knows in his own heart how much he has failed or succeeded. But here is Miss Brandon, a beginner still at the cross-roads, and with the will yet hers to choose which she will take. You're not afraid of hard work, Miss Brandon?" "Not a bit," I answered fervently.