ome months.
It is late in the winter; Parliament and the season have commenced. I
work hard,--Heaven knows, harder than I should have worked at college.
Take a day for sample.

Trevanion gets up at eight o'clock, and in all--weathers rides an
hour before breakfast; at nine he takes that meal in his wife's
dressing-room; at half-past nine he comes into his study. By that
time he expects to find done by his secretary the work I am about to
describe.

On coming home,--or rather before going to bed, which is usually after
three o'clock,--it is Mr. Trevanion's habit to leave on the table of the
said study a list of directions for the secretary. The following, which
I take at random from many I have preserved, may show their multifarious
nature:--

1. Look out in the Reports (Committee, House of Lords) for the last
seven years all that is said about the growth of flax; mark the
passages for me.

2. Do, do. "Irish Emigration."

3. Hunt out second volume of Kames's "History of Man," passage
containing Reid's Logic,--don't know where the book is!

4. How does the line beginning Lumina conjurent, inter something,
end? Is it in Grey? See.

5. Fracastorius writes: Quantum hoe infecit vitium, quot adiverit
urbes. Query, ought it not, in strict grammar, to be injecerit,
instead of infecit? If you don't know, write to father.

6. Write the four letters in full from the notes I leave; i. e.,
about the Ecclesiastical Courts.

7. Look out Population Returns: strike average of last five years
(between mortality and births) in Devonshire and Lancashire.

8. Answer these six begging letters "No,"--civilly.

9. The other six, to constituents, "that I have no interest with
Government."

10. See, if you have time, whether any of the new books on the
round table are not trash.

11. I want to know All about Indian corn.

12. Longinus says something, somewhere, in regret for uncongenial
pursuits (public life, I suppose): what is it? N. B. Longinus is
not in my London catalogue, but is here, I know,--I think in a box
in the lumber-room.

13. Set right the calculation I leave on the poor-rates. I have
made a blunder somewhere, etc.

Certainly my father knew Mr. Trevanion; he never expected a secretary to
sleep! To get through the work required of me by half-past nine, I get
up by candle-light. At half-past nine I am still hunting for Longinus,
wh