ense of your education; and since a
considerable portion of it consists of a pension, which will cease on
your being twenty-one, it will not be sufficient for your support, so
that you must make up your mind speedily what profession you will adopt,
and must exert every effort to get into it. Our vicar here, a young man
newly come, is a mathematician and a good German scholar, two subjects
which gain good marks, I am told, in all these competitive examinations,
and I have made arrangements for you to read with him every morning for
a couple of hours."

This was not a very bright look-out for the summer holidays. "Since it
was so very necessary for him to work, it was perhaps well that he
should not have too much to distract him," he said sarcastically; but
found some truth in the words, for he was forced into taking an interest
in a German novel which the clergyman, with some tact, chose for him to
translate. But the life _was_ dull; when he sought out his former
companions, the village scapegraces, he found that there had been a
grand clear out of them; it was as if the parish had taken a moral
purgative. Bill had enlisted; Tom, the worst of the lot, had (it was
his mother who spoke) "got into bad company and gone to Lunnon;" Dick
and Jim were in prison, and Harry had reformed and been taken into a
gentleman's stables. Solitude!

His principal amusement was shooting rabbits. September was close at
hand, and if he had sought the society of his equals, instead of making
a bad name in the neighbourhood in former years, he would probably have
had more than one invitation to better sport amongst the partridges; but
he had such an evil reputation that the gentlemen of the county did not
covet his society for their sons. Now, rabbit shooting in the winter,
with dogs to hunt the bunnies through brushwood, furze, or bracken, so
that snap-shots are offered as they dart across open places, is very
good fun; but the only way Saurin had of getting at them at this season
was by lying in wait in the evening outside the woods and shooting them
when they came louping cautiously out. He found excitement in this at
first, but it was impossible to miss such pot-shots for one thing, and
he got very few chances for another. The report of the gun frightened
them all into the wood, not to venture out again for some time, probably
till it was too dark to distinguish them. The only chance was, when a
rabbit had been got at one place,