"Not a bit of it, if you lean forward. You are easy to take up, but you are not at all easy to put down, Master Tommy. You are as quick as lightning, to begin with. Nature has provided you with that, no doubt, to atone for your want of thunder. Don't be always running down yourself. There are very few fellows who can do what you can; even if you have altogether dropped your wings, through the gross feeding of these Oxford butteries. But I mean you to put on your wings again. I have a whole lot of things for you to do; and flying is a most essential part. Professor Megalow is coming down; now that I am of age, and all that sort of thing, he can stop at the Towers, as long as he likes. I am sorry to inform you, that he is a Rad. But a man of his size may be anything he likes, without being any the worse for it. I intend to consult him about you, Tommy, how we may launch you on the clouds again." "I have not seen him for years," I said; "if he is going to be there, 'twill be enough to make me fly again." CHAPTER XXIII. A COUNTY MEETING. How easy it is, for a good-natured man to be taken for the opposite; and yet how hard for ill-natured people, to put on the guise of kindness! Not that the world is distinctly divided into those two classes; for the greater part of it have mixed natures, and are operated on by the mixture. There scarcely could be any one with a better nature, than Sir Roland Twentifold. He was large-hearted, quick-hearted, soft-hearted too, (when touched at the proper fibre) and yet any Radical stranger who met him, would have thought him the opposite of all these. He had private, and personal motives, (which he disdained to speak of, as being too small; yet perhaps they were the spring of everything) for strongly abhorring what he called, "the faction now ruining this Country." I never could believe that any faction would be so factious, as to harm their Country, knowingly, and of set purpose. Yet this he believed, from the bottom of his heart; and it cannot be denied, that their words, and deeds, have gone far to bear out his assumptions. It must have been the third week in July, and the prime of a glorious summer--such as we never are blest with now--when I had the happiness of visiting, once more, the noble Towers-Twentifold. The woods, and the hills, and the meadows, and even the hollow places that faced the north, had cast away the shivers, yet preserved the freshness, of the cooler time of growth. Many of the fields were lined, or hillocked, with the peaceful tide of hay, which is late in coming into harbour there; while, upon the forward slopes, green corn was wavering into fluent pathways for the wandering wind. And among all the view of the land, flowed in that faint reflection from the distant sea, which looks as if light threw a shadow of itself.