“Let a man stick in the mud, and the mud will stick to him. You put your heart in your farm, and your son would only put his foot into it. Courage! Don’t you see that Time is a whirligig, and all things come round? Every day somebody leaves the land and goes off into trade. By and by he grows rich, and then his great desire is to get back to the land again. He left it the son of a farmer: he returns to it as a squire. Your son, when he gets to be fifty, will invest his savings in acres, and have tenants of his own. Lord, how he will lay down the law to them! I would not advise you to take a farm under him.”
“Catch me at it!” said the farmer. “He would turn all the contents of the ‘pothecary’s shop into my fallows, and call it ‘progress.’”
“Let him physic the fallows when he has farms of his own: keep yours out of his chemical clutches. Come, I shall tell him to pack up and be off to his uncle’s next week?”
“Well, well,” said the farmer, in a resigned tone: “a wilful man must e’en have his way.”
“And the best thing a sensible man can do is not to cross it. Mr. Saunderson, give me your honest hand. You are one of those men who put the sons of good fathers in mind of their own; and I think of mine when I say ‘God bless you!’”
Quitting the farmer, Kenelm re-entered the house, and sought Mr. Saunderson junior in his own room. He found that young gentleman still up, and reading an eloquent tract on the Emancipation of the Human Race from all Tyrannical Control,—Political, Social, Ecclesiastical, and Domestic.
The lad looked up sulkily, and said, on encountering Kenelm’s melancholic visage, “Ah! I see you have talked with the old governor, and he’ll not hear of it.”
“In the first place,” answered Kenelm, “since you value yourself on a superior education, allow me to advise you to study the English language, as the forms of it are maintained by the elder authors, whom, in spite of an Age of Progress, men of superior education esteem. No one who has gone through that study; no one, indeed, who has studied the Ten Commandments in the vernacular,—commits the mistake of supposing that ‘the old governor’ is a synonymous expression for ‘father.’ In the second place, since you pretend to the superior enlightenment which results from a superior education, learn to know better your own self before you set up as a teacher of mankind. Excuse the liberty I take, as your sincere well-wisher, when I tell you that you are at present a conceited fool,—in short, that which makes one boy call another an ‘ass.’ But when one has a poor head he may redeem the average balance of humanity by increasing the wealth of the heart. Try and increase yours. Your father consents to your choice of your lot at the sacrifice of all his own inclinations. This is a sore trial to a father’s pride, a father’s affection; and few fathers make such sacrifices with a good grace. I have thus kept my promise to you, and enforced your wishes on Mr. Saunderson’s judgment, because I am sure you would have been a very bad farmer. It now remains for you to show that you can be a very good tradesman. You are bound in honour to me and to your father to try your best to be so; and meanwhile leave the task of upsetting the world to those who have no shop in it, which would go crash in the general tumble. And so good-night to you.”
To these admonitory words, sacro digna silentio, Saunderson junior listened with a dropping jaw and fascinated staring eyes. He felt like an infant to whom the nurse has given a hasty shake, and who is too stupefied by that operation to know whether he is hurt or not.
A minute after Kenelm had quitted the room he reappeared at the door, and said in a conciliatory whisper, “Don’t take it to heart that I called you a conceited fool and an ass. These terms are no doubt just as applicable to myself. But there is a more conceited fool and a greater ass than either of us; and that is the Age in which we have the misfortune to be born,—an Age of Progress, Mr. Saunderson, junior!—an Age of Prigs.”