sleight of hand. That one human brain should actually contain the amount
of knowledge John Short appeared to possess was not credible to the
Honourable Cornelius, and the latter spent more of his time in trying to
discover how John "did it" than in trying to "do it" himself.
Nevertheless, young Angleside liked Short after his own fashion, and
Short did not dislike Angleside. John's father had given him to
understand that as a general rule persons of wealth and good birth were a
set of overbearing, purse-proud bullies, who considered men of genius to
be little better than a set of learned monkeys, certainly not good enough
to black their boots. For John's father in his misfortunes had imbibed
sundry radical notions formerly peculiar to poor literary men, and not
yet altogether extinct, and he had accordingly warned his son that all
mammon was the mammon of unrighteousness, and that the people who
possessed it were the natural enemies of people who had to live by their
brains. But John had very soon discovered that though Cornelius Angleside
possessed the three qualifications for perdition, in the shape of birth,
wealth and ignorance, against which his poor father railed unceasingly,
he succeeded nevertheless in making himself very good company. Angleside
was not overbearing, he was not purse-proud and he was not a bully. On
the contrary he was unobtrusive and sufficiently simple in manner, and he
certainly never mentioned the subject of his family or fortune; John
rather pitied him, on the whole, until he began to discover that
Angleside looked up to him on account of his mental superiority, and then
John, being very human, began to like him.

The life at the vicarage of Billingsfield, Essex, was not remarkable for
anything but its extreme regularity. Prayers, breakfast, work, lunch, a
walk, work, dinner, work, prayers, bed. The programme never varied, save
as the seasons introduced some change in the hours of the establishment.
The vicar, who was fond of a little gardening and amused himself with a
variety of experiments in the laying of asparagus beds, found occasional
excitement in the pursuit of a stray cat which had managed to climb his
wire netting and get at the heads of his favourite vegetable, in which
thrilling chase he was usually aided by an old brown retriever answering,
when he answered at all, to the name of Carlo, and by the Honourable
Cornelius, whose skill in throwing stones was as phenomenal as his
igno