“You think there would be no brutes in particular. It may be so; but education is universal in China, and so is the bastinado. I thought, however, that you said the schoolmaster was abroad, and that the age of enlightenment was in full progress.”
“Yes, in the towns, but not in these obsolete rural districts; and that brings me to the point. I feel lost, thrown away here. I have something in me, sir, and it can only come out by collision with equal minds. So do me a favour, will you?”
“With the greatest pleasure.”
“Give the governor a hint that he can’t expect me, after the education I have had, to follow the plough and fatten pigs; and that Manchester is the place for ME.”
“Why Manchester?”
“Because I have a relation in business there who will give me a clerkship if the governor will consent. And Manchester rules England.”
“Mr. Bob Saunderson, I will do my best to promote your wishes. This is a land of liberty, and every man should choose his own walk in it, so that, at the last, if he goes to the dogs, he goes to them without that disturbance of temper which is naturally occasioned by the sense of being driven to their jaws by another man against his own will. He has then no one to blame but himself. And that, Mr. Bob, is a great comfort. When, having got into a scrape, we blame others, we unconsciously become unjust, spiteful, uncharitable, malignant, perhaps revengeful. We indulge in feelings which tend to demoralize the whole character. But when we only blame ourselves, we become modest and penitent. We make allowances for others. And indeed self-blame is a salutary exercise of conscience, which a really good man performs every day of his life. And now, will you show me the room in which I am to sleep, and forget for a few hours that I am alive at all: the best thing that can happen to us in this world, my dear Mr. Bob! There’s never much amiss with our days, so long as we can forget about them the moment we lay our heads on the pillow.”
The two young men entered the house amicably, arm in arm. The girls had already retired, but Mrs. Saunderson was still up to conduct her visitor to the guest’s chamber,—a pretty room which had been furnished twenty-two years ago on the occasion of the farmer’s marriage, at the expense of Mrs. Saunderson’s mother, for her own occupation when she paid them a visit, and with its dimity curtains and trellised paper it still looked as fresh and new as if decorated and furnished yesterday.
Left alone, Kenelm undressed, and before he got into bed, bared his right arm, and doubling it, gravely contemplated its muscular development, passing his left hand over that prominence in the upper part which is vulgarly called the ball. Satisfied apparently with the size and the firmness of that pugilistic protuberance, he gently sighed forth, “I fear I shall have to lick Thomas Bowles.” In five minutes more he was asleep.