next minute I was on his back flying
over the lawn at a stretching gallop. Fences abounded on all sides, and
I rushed him at double ditches, stone walls, and bog-wood rails, with a
mad delight that at every leap rose higher. After about three quarters
of an hour thus passed, his blood, as well as my own, being by this time
thoroughly roused, I determined to try him at the wall of an old pound
which stood some few hundred yards from the front of the house. Its
exposure to the window at any other time would have deterred me from
even the thought of such an exploit, but now I was quite beyond the pale
of such cold calculations; besides that, I was accompanied by a select
party of all the laborers, with their wives and children, whose praises
of my horsemanship would have made me take the lock of a canal if before
me. A tine gallop of grass sward led to the pound, and over this I went,
cheered with as merry a cry as ever stirred a light heart. One glance I
threw at the house as I drew near the leap. The window of the breakfast
parlor was open; my father and Mr. Basset were both at it, I saw
their faces red with passion; I heard their loud shout; my very
spirit sickened within me. I saw no more; I felt the pony rush at the
wall,--the quick stroke of his feet,--the rise,--the plunge,--and then
a crash,--and I was sent spinning over his head some half-dozen yards,
ploughing up the ground on face and hands. I was carried home with a
broken head; the pony's knees were in the same condition. My father said
that he ought to be shot for humanity's sake; Tony suggested the same
treatment for me, on similar grounds. The upshot, however, was, I
secured an enemy for life; and worse still, one whose power to injure was
equalled by his inclination.

Into the company of these two worthies I now found myself thus
accidentally thrown, and would gladly have retreated at once, but that
some indescribable impulse to be near my father's sickbed was on me; and
so I crept stealthily in and sat down in a large chair at the foot of
the bed, where unnoticed I listened to the long-drawn heavings of his
chest, and in silence wept over my own desolate condition.

For a long time the absorbing nature of my own grief prevented me
hearing the muttered conversation near the lire; but at length, as the
night wore on and my sorrow had found vent in tears, I began to listen
to the dialogue beside me.

"He 'll have five hundred pounds under his grandfather's