own in Betty's parlance--sat at
dinner together.

Although not an elegant dinner table it was very far removed from being
a poor one. The linen, silver and glass were all of the best, the very
best; the man-servant was decorous and swift of eye, foot and hand, and
the menu was beyond any that had entered into John Brown's knowledge,
before he came to Dene Hall. Yet he was out of love with it all.

Captain Carew had his glass of clear saffron-coloured wine at his right
hand. His silver fork was making easy journeyings from a slice of cold
turkey on his plate, to his mouth, and his eyes were now and again
running over a long type-written letter that lay before him.

He was well pleased, well fed, and interested, and he had no reason to
suppose John Brown was in any other humour than himself.

He had heard that the thoughts of youth were of vast length, and perhaps
he believed it. But he did not think John's had reached quite as far as
wishing to be a cobbler in a country village.

And it must be confessed that few, seeing the appetite the boy brought
to his plate of cold turkey and "snowed" potato, would have suspected
him of longing for a "crust of bread and a drink of cold water."

The truth was, he had been of late ransacking his grandfather's library
and had found besides sea-stories and stories of wrecks, and foreign
lands and pirates and deep sea treasure--what interested him more than
all, a volume of biographies of self-made men.

He had lingered longingly over their boyhoods; their brief school times
(when such times were lacking altogether he liked both man and story
better); their privations, struggles, self-reliance and success. The
success interested him the least. That came, of course, he decided, to
all who tried hard enough. But the privations! The struggle! The
self-reliance! How his eyes shone and his heart beat at it!

There was the story of Richard Arkwright, the great mechanician. _He_
was never at school in his life--never forced to do ridiculous sums, to
spell correctly, to parse, to drill, to sing! His biographer said that
the only education he ever received he gave himself--that he was fifty
years of age when he set to work to learn grammar and to improve his
hand-writing. He did not waste the precious hours of his youth over such
things. When he was a boy he was apprenticed to a barber, and when he
set up in business for himself he occupied an underground cellar and put
up his sign--"Come