elf to philology and the races
of man. Nothing considerable has been done with them as a combined
pursuit." And with these views he returned home--while Peregrine Orme
at Oxford was still addicted to the hunting of rats.

But with philology and the races of man he consented to combine the
pursuit of agriculture. When his mother found that he wished to take
up his abode in his own house, she by no means opposed him, and
suggested that, as such was his intention, he himself should farm his
own land. He was very ready to do this, and had she not represented
that such a step was in every way impolitic, he would willingly have
requested Mr. Greenwood of the Old Farm to look elsewhere, and have
spread himself and his energies over the whole domain. As it was he
contented himself with desiring that Mr. Dockwrath would vacate his
small holding, and as he was imperative as to that his mother gave
way without making it the cause of a battle. She would willingly have
left Mr. Dockwrath in possession, and did say a word or two as to the
milk necessary for those sixteen children. But Lucius Mason was ducal
in his ideas, and intimated an opinion that he had a right to do what
he liked with his own. Had not Mr. Dockwrath been told, when the
fields were surrendered to him as a favour, that he would only have
them in possession till the heir should come of age? Mr. Dockwrath
had been so told; but tellings such as these are easily forgotten by
men with sixteen children. And thus Mr. Mason became an agriculturist
with special scientific views as to chemistry, and a philologist
with the object of making that pursuit bear upon his studies with
reference to the races of man. He was convinced that by certain
admixtures of ammonia and earths he could produce cereal results
hitherto unknown to the farming world, and that by tracing out the
roots of words he could trace also the wanderings of man since the
expulsion of Adam from the garden. As to the latter question his
mother was not inclined to contradict him. Seeing that he would sit
at the feet neither of Mr. Furnival nor of Mr. Brown, she had no
objection to the races of man. She could endure to be talked to about
the Oceanic Mongolidae and the Iapetidae of the Indo-Germanic class,
and had perhaps her own ideas that such matters, though somewhat
foggy, were better than rats. But when he came to the other subject,
and informed her that the properly plentiful feeding of the world
was only ke