who lived in the
little vicarage of Dalton with my father, seemed a palace.

It was indeed a very fine place, with statues in the hall and pictures
in the gallery and peacocks on the terrace. Lady Jane, the daughter of
a wealthy peer, who had almost put things on their old footing with her
ample dowry, was a very great lady, and had been used, I was told, to
an even more splendid home; but to me, who had no mother, she was simply
the kindest and most gracious woman I had ever known.

My connection with the Luscombes arose from their only son Richard
being my father's pupil. We were both brought up at home, but for very
different reasons. In my case it was from economy: the living was small
and our family was large, though, as it happened, I had no brothers.
Richard was too precious to his parents to be trusted to the tender
mercies of a public school. He was in delicate health, not so much
natural to him as caused by an excess of care--coddling. Though he and I
were very good friends, unless when we were quarreling, it must be owned
that he was a spoiled boy.

There is a good deal of nonsense talked of young gentlemen who are
brought up from their cradles in an atmosphere of flattery _not_
being spoiled; but unless they are angels--which is a very exceptional
case--it cannot be otherwise. Richard Luscombe was a good fellow in
many ways; liberal with his money (indeed, apt to be lavish), and
kind-hearted, but self-willed, effeminate, and impulsive. He had
also--which was a source of great alarm and grief to his father--a
marked taste for speculation.

After the age of "alley tors and commoneys," of albert-rock and
hard-bake, in which we both gambled frightfully, I could afford him no
opportunities of gratifying this passion; but if he could get a little
money "on" anything, there was nothing that pleased him better--not
that he cared for the money, but for the delight of winning it. The next
moment he would give it away to a beggar. Numbers of good people look
upon gambling with even greater horror than it deserves, because they
cannot understand this; the attraction of risk, and the wild joy of
"pulling off" something when the chances are against one, are unknown to
them. It is the same with the love of liquor. Richard Luscombe had not
a spark of that (his father left him one of the best cellars in England,
but he never touches even a glass of claret after dinner; "I should as
soon think," he says, "of eating when I