s Orbilius to Sir Peter, marked
"confidential":--

DEAR SIR PETER CHILLINGLY,--I have never felt more anxious for the
future career of any of my pupils than I do for that of your son. He is
so clever that, with ease to himself, he may become a great man. He is
so peculiar that it is quite as likely that he may only make himself
known to the world as a great oddity. That distinguished teacher Dr.
Arnold said that the difference between one boy and another was not so
much talent as energy. Your son has talent, has energy: yet he wants
something for success in life; he wants the faculty of amalgamation. He
is of a melancholic and therefore unsocial temperament. He will not act
in concert with others. He is lovable enough: the other boys like him,
especially the smaller ones, with whom he is a sort of hero; but he
has not one intimate friend. So far as school learning is concerned,
he might go to college at once, and with the certainty of distinction
provided he chose to exert himself. But if I may venture to offer an
advice, I should say employ the next two years in letting him see
a little more of real life and acquire a due sense of its practical
objects. Send him to a private tutor who is not a pedant, but a man
of letters or a man of the world, and if in the metropolis so much the
better. In a word, my young friend is unlike other people; and, with
qualities that might do anything in life, I fear, unless you can get
him to be like other people, that he will do nothing. Excuse the freedom
with which I write, and ascribe it to the singular interest with which
your son has inspired me. I have the honour to be, dear Sir Peter,

Yours truly, WILLIAM HORTON.

Upon the strength of this letter Sir Peter did not indeed summon another
family council; for he did not consider that his three maiden sisters
could offer any practical advice on the matter. And as to Mr. Gordon,
that gentleman having gone to law on the great timber question, and
having been signally beaten thereon, had informed Sir Peter that he
disowned him as a cousin and despised him as a man; not exactly in those
words,--more covertly, and therefore more stingingly. But Sir Peter
invited Mr. Mivers for a week's shooting, and requested the Reverend
John to meet him.

Mr. Mivers arrived. The sixteen years that had elapsed since he was
first introduced to the reader had made no perceptible change in his
appearance. It was one of his maxims that in youth a man