een universally liked at Battersby. She was then
a quick, smart, hard-working girl--and a very pretty one. When at last
they met again she was on her best behaviour, in fact, she was modesty
and demureness itself. What wonder, then, that his imagination should
fail to realise the changes that eight years must have worked? He knew
too much against himself, and was too bankrupt in love to be squeamish;
if Ellen had been only what he thought her, and if his prospects had been
in reality no better than he believed they were, I do not know that there
is anything much more imprudent in what Ernest proposed than there is in
half the marriages that take place every day.

There was nothing for it, however, but to make the best of the
inevitable, so I wished my young friend good fortune, and told him he
could have whatever money he wanted to start his shop with, if what he
had in hand was not sufficient. He thanked me, asked me to be kind
enough to let him do all my mending and repairing, and to get him any
other like orders that I could, and left me to my own reflections.

I was even more angry when he was gone than I had been while he was with
me. His frank, boyish face had beamed with a happiness that had rarely
visited it. Except at Cambridge he had hardly known what happiness
meant, and even there his life had been clouded as of a man for whom
wisdom at the greatest of its entrances was quite shut out. I had seen
enough of the world and of him to have observed this, but it was
impossible, or I thought it had been impossible, for me to have helped
him.

Whether I ought to have tried to help him or not I do not know, but I am
sure that the young of all animals often do want help upon matters about
which anyone would say _a priori_ that there should be no difficulty. One
would think that a young seal would want no teaching how to swim, nor yet
a bird to fly, but in practice a young seal drowns if put out of its
depth before its parents have taught it to swim; and so again, even the
young hawk must be taught to fly before it can do so.

I grant that the tendency of the times is to exaggerate the good which
teaching can do, but in trying to teach too much, in most matters, we
have neglected others in respect of which a little sensible teaching
would do no harm.

I know it is the fashion to say that young people must find out things
for themselves, and so they probably would if they had fair play to the
extent of not