s foot in the
stirrup.

Young Peregrine Orme, as he rode home, felt that the world was using
him very unkindly. Everything was going wrong with him, and an idea
entered his head that he might as well go and look for Sir John
Franklin at the North Pole, or join some energetic traveller in the
middle of Central Africa. He had proposed to Madeline Staveley and
had been refused. That in itself caused a load to lie on his heart
which was almost unendurable;--and now his grandfather was going to
disgrace himself. He had made his little effort to be respectable
and discreet, devoting himself to the county hunt and county
drawing-rooms, giving up the pleasures of London and the glories of
dissipation. And for what?

Then Peregrine began to argue within himself as some others have done
before him--

"Were it not better done as others use--" he said to himself, in that
or other language; and as he rode slowly into the courtyard of The
Cleeve, he thought almost with regret of his old friend Carroty Bob.

CHAPTER XXXVII

PEREGRINE'S ELOQUENCE

In the last chapter Peregrine Orme called at Orley Farm with the
view of discussing with Lucius Mason the conduct of their respective
progenitors; and, as will be remembered, the young men agreed in
a general way that their progenitors were about to make fools of
themselves. Poor Peregrine, however, had other troubles on his mind.
Not only had his grandfather been successful in love, but he had
been unsuccessful. As he had journeyed home from Noningsby to The
Cleeve in a high-wheeled vehicle which he called his trap, he had
determined, being then in a frame of mind somewhat softer than was
usual with him, to tell all his troubles to his mother. It sounds as
though it were lack-a-daisical--such a resolve as this on the part
of a dashing young man, who had been given to the pursuit of rats,
and was now a leader among the sons of Nimrod in the pursuit of
foxes. Young men of the present day, when got up for the eyes of the
world, look and talk as though they could never tell their mothers
anything,--as though they were harder than flint, and as little in
want of a woman's counsel and a woman's help as a colonel of horse
on the morning of a battle. But the rigid virility of his outward
accoutrements does in no way alter the man of flesh and blood who
wears them; the young hero, so stern to the eye, is, I believe, as
often tempted by stress of sentiment to lay bare the sorrow of hi