"Robert is not ill educated, in as far as the limits of our colonial possibilities extend; but his education will aid him little in English life, and towards that his inclinations set.
"Turn all I have said over, and write to me concerning it. Then, by the time I get home, if I ever get home, and, if I do not, by the time I send my boy home, you will have made up your mind, which, in a matter of this kind will be, as it ought to be, equivalent to making up mine, as to the proper course to be pursued.
"With all his faults, Robert will interest you, my dear Dugdale, I am certain; in his industry, his ambition, and his adaptive nature you will find something to admire.
"I have almost forgotten the ways of the old country, so completely have I turned--not my mind only, but my heart and my tastes--to the life of the new. I daresay you remember the days in which I was rather a 'buck,' ran heavy accounts with our common tailor, and knew, or pretended to know, a lot about good dinners and wines.
"Ask Mrs. Hungerford what sort of rough and gruff old fellow I am now, and you will understand, from her description, the difficulty I should have in getting into, or even comprehending, the ways of the other side of the world again. But, remembering what I once did know, and thinking of what I have heard and seen since I ceased to know, I think Robert is cut out for success in England. Mind, he will not have it all to do unaided; he will have a little money, enough to keep him respectable, to back him.
"I feel I am unwise in thus talking to you so much beforehand of Robert--time enough when we meet, as I hope we shall do; but I have a notion you might hit upon some plan for him for the future more easily and successfully if you had an idea of the sort of person he is.
"If his mother could see this letter, and recognise the very moderate colours in which I have sketched her eldest son, I don't think I should hear the last of it between this and the date at which I and he are to start for England. I am such a dolt in these matters, I do not rightly know what to ask you to think about, or advise me upon; but you will know generally. Shall it be private tuition, or public school, or business life at once combined with education?
"My other boys never give me the least anxiety. I know they will take to the sheep-walk or the counting-house as readily as to their food, and plod on as comfortably and as cheerily as possible. And, indeed, while I am anxious about Robert, it would be giving you an unfair impression to say that I am uneasy about him. I am not that; but he is so different a stamp, I hardly know how to manage him.
"I have written all this to you with as much ease and confidence as if we were smoking together in the old quarters, velveteen-coated and slippered, as in the time I remember so well. I wonder if you--who have remained in England, to whom, at all events, life cannot have brought such physical changes as it has brought to me--remember it half so well as I do.
"There are hours even yet, when I am alone and thinking, when all that has intervened seems utterly unreal, and those old days, with their old associations, the one true and living period in my life. Do you remember the day after you, poor little shivering youngster as you were then, came to school, when I was a great hulking fellow, and my mother, God bless her! came to visit me, and, being taken by old Maddox to see the playground, was just in time to behold me tumble from the very top of the forbidden pear-tree and break my arm?