h Farm, about eleven hundred acres, and the
stock, implements; the ploughing, sowing, &c. already performed, to be
paid for at a valuation based on present prices. I drew out the
agreement in form, it was signed in duplicate, a large sum was paid
down as deposit, and Mr Hurst with his friend withdrew.

'Well,' I said, taking a glass of port from a bottle Dutton had just
ordered in--'here's fortune in your new career; but as I am a living
man, I can't understand what you can be thinking about.'

'You haven't read the newspapers?'

'O yes, I have! Victory! Glory! March to Paris! and all that sort of
thing. Very fine, I daresay; but rubbish, moonshine, I call it, if
purchased by the abandonment of the useful, comfortable, joyous life
of a prosperous yeoman.'

'Is that all you have seen in the papers?'

'Not much else. What, besides, have you found in them?'

'Wheat, at ten or eleven pounds a load--less perhaps--other produce in
proportion.'

'Ha!'

'I see further, Sharp, than you bookmen do, in some matters. Boney's
done for; that to me is quite plain, and earlier than I thought
likely; although I, of course, as well as every other man with
a head instead of a turnip on his shoulders, knew such a
raw-head-and-bloody-bones as that must sooner or later come to the
dogs. And as I also know what agricultural prices were _before_ the
war, I can calculate without the aid of vulgar fractions, which, by
the by, I never reached, what they'll be when it's over, and the
thundering expenditure now going on is stopped. In two or three weeks,
people generally will get a dim notion of all this; and I sell,
therefore, whilst I can, at top prices.'

The shrewdness of the calculation struck me at once. 'You will take
another farm when one can be had on easier terms than now, I suppose?'

'Yes; if I can manage it. And I _will_ manage it. Between ourselves,
after all the old man's debts are paid, I shall only have about nine
or ten hundred pounds to the good, even by selling at the present
tremendous rates; so it was time, you see, I pulled up, and rubbed the
fog out of my eyes a bit. And, hark ye, Master Sharp!' he added, as we
rose and shook hands with each other--'I have now done _playing_ with
the world--it's a place of work and business; and I'll do my share of
it so effectually, that my children, if I have any, shall, if I do
not, reach the class of landed gentry; and this you'll find, for all
your sneering, will come about