In his own rooms this quality of mind was still more apparent. I have said that he and his mother lived with Spartan simplicity. This enabled him to do a great deal more with his wages than his more luxurious companions. First, comforts, and then superfluities--elegances, if we may use the word--began to flow into the room. The elegances, perhaps, were not very elegant at first, but his taste improved at the most rapid rate. When he had nothing better to do, he would go and take counsel with Fullady the wood-carver, and get lessons from him, helping now and then at a piece of work, to the astonishment of his master. In the evening he carved small pieces of furniture, with which he decorated his dwelling. In winter he was initiated into the mysteries of boat-building, and worked at this trade with absolute devotion and real enjoyment. In short, Dick’s opinion was that nobody so happy as himself had ever lived--his work was as good as play, and better, he thought; and he was paid for doing what it gave him the greatest pleasure to do--a perennial joke with the gentle fellow. In all this prosperity Dick never forgot his first patron. When Val rowed, Dick ran by the bank shouting till he was hoarse. When Val was preferred to be one of the sublime Eight, who are as gods among men, he went almost out of his wits with pride and joy. “_We’ll_ win now, sure enough, at Henley!” he said to his mother, with unconscious appropriation of the possessive pronoun. But when Dick heard of the squabble between Val and his tutor, his good sense showed at once. He took his young patron a step aside, taking off his hat with almost an exaggeration of respect--“Don’t come to our house again, sir,” he said; “the gentleman is in the right. You are very kind to be so free with me, to talk and make me almost a friend; but it wouldn’t do if every Eton gentleman were to make friends with the fellows on the water-side--the gentleman is in the right.” “My people don’t think so, Brown,” cried Val; “look here, what has been sent me to buy you something,” and he showed his ten-pound note. Dick’s eyes flashed with eager pleasure, not for the money, though even that was no small matter. “I don’t understand,” lie added, after a moment, shaking his head. “I don’t think they’d like it either, if they knew. You must have been giving too good an account, sir, of mother and me.”