e street, and picked up the slice of bread. Now in those days bread
was precious, exceedingly. The poor folk rarely got it; they lived on
rye or meal. John Halifax had probably not tasted wheaten bread like
this for months: it appeared not, he eyed it so ravenously;--then,
glancing towards the shut door, his mind seemed to change. He was a
long time before he ate a morsel; when he did so, it was quietly and
slowly; looking very thoughtful all the while.

As soon as the rain ceased, we took our way home, down the High Street,
towards the Abbey church--he guiding my carriage along in silence. I
wished he would talk, and let me hear again his pleasant Cornish accent.

"How strong you are!" said I, sighing, when, with a sudden pull, he had
saved me from being overturned by a horseman riding past--young Mr.
Brithwood of the Mythe House, who never cared where he galloped or whom
he hurt--"So tall and so strong."

"Am I? Well, I shall want my strength."

"How?"

"To earn my living."

He drew up his broad shoulders, and planted on the pavement a firmer
foot, as if he knew he had the world before him--would meet it
single-handed, and without fear.

"What have you worked at lately?"

"Anything I could get, for I have never learned a trade."

"Would you like to learn one?"

He hesitated a minute, as if weighing his speech. "Once I thought I
should like to be what my father was."

"What was he?"

"A scholar and a gentleman."

This was news, though it did not much surprise me. My father, tanner
as he was, and pertinaciously jealous of the dignity of trade, yet held
strongly the common-sense doctrine of the advantages of good descent;
at least, in degree. For since it is a law of nature, admitting only
rare exceptions, that the qualities of the ancestors should be
transmitted to the race--the fact seems patent enough, that even
allowing equal advantages, a gentleman's son has more chances of
growing up a gentleman than the son of a working man. And though he
himself, and his father before him, had both been working men, still, I
think, Abel Fletcher never forgot that we originally came of a good
stock, and that it pleased him to call me, his only son, after one of
our forefathers, not unknown--Phineas Fletcher, who wrote the "Purple
Island."

Thus it seemed to me, and I doubted not it would to my father, much
more reasonable and natural that a boy like John Halifax--in whom from
every word he said I dete