ther's fold.

Now I question much if all Dr. Riccabocca's sage maxims, though they
were often very moral, and generally very wise, served to expand the
peasant boy's native good qualities, and correct his bad, half so well
as the few simple words, not at all indebted to Machiavelli, which
Leonard had once reverently listened to when he stood by his father's
chair, yielded up for the moment to the good Parson, worthy to sit in
it; for Mr. Dale had a heart in which all the fatherless of the parish
found their place. Nor was this loss of tender, intimate, spiritual love
so counterbalanced by the greater facilities for purely intellectual
instruction, as modern enlightenment might presume. For, without
disputing the advantage of knowledge in a general way, knowledge, in
itself, is not friendly to content. Its tendency, of course, is to
increase the desires, to dissatisfy us with what is, in order to urge
progress to what may be; and, in that progress, what unnoticed martyrs
among the many must fall, baffled and crushed by the way! To how large a
number will be given desires they will never realize, dissatisfaction of
the lot from which they will never rise! _Allons!_ one is viewing the
dark side of the question. It is all the fault of that confounded
Riccabocca, who has already caused Lenny Fairfield to lean gloomily on
his spade, and, after looking round and seeing no one near him, groan
out querulously--

"And am I born to dig a potato ground?"

_Pardieu_, my friend Lenny, if you live to be seventy, and ride in your
carriage;--and by the help of a dinner-pill digest a spoonful of curry,
you may sigh to think what a relish there was in potatoes, roasted in
ashes after you had digged them out of that ground with your own stout
young hands. Dig on, Lenny Fairfield, dig on! Dr. Riccabocca will tell
you that there was once an illustrious personage[R] who made experience
of two very different occupations--one was ruling men, the other was
planting cabbages; he thought planting cabbages much the pleasanter of
the two!

CHAPTER XVII.

Dr. Riccabocca had secured Lenny Fairfield, and might therefore be
considered to have ridden his hobby in the great whirligig with
adroitness and success. But Miss Jemima was still driving round in her
car, bundling the reins, and flourishing the whip, without apparently
having got an inch nearer to the flying form of Dr. Riccabocca.

Indeed, that excellent and only too susceptible spinster